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Summary: The chip's impressive speed gains are because it uses on-chip SRAM instead of off-chip DRAM.

The chip is able to fit much more into SRAM because the chip uses network compression, pruning, quantization, Huffman encoding, etc.



Also, that this is another example of more specialized chip sets eating away at general purpose CPU/GPU market share.


> Static random-access memory (static RAM or SRAM) is a type of semiconductor memory that uses bistable latching circuitry (flip-flop) to store each bit. SRAM exhibits data remanence,[1] but it is still volatile in the conventional sense that data is eventually lost when the memory is not powered.

The term static differentiates SRAM from DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) which must be periodically refreshed. SRAM is faster and more expensive than DRAM; it is typically used for CPU cache while DRAM is used for a computer's main memory.

WP


Also, the on-board RAM is SRAM rather than DRAM.


Where does it say that? On-board SRAM would be very strange, as it's incredibly expensive and not at all performant compared to DRAM.


From the paper's abstract: This allows fitting the model into on-chip SRAM cache rather than off-chip DRAM memory


Exactly, that says "on-chip SRAM" not "on-board SRAM". Very different things, and my point stands.


Pretty sure from the context the OP was saying on board the chip.




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