The competition is heating up for Nvidia (NVDA), as AI chipmaker Cerebras (CBRS) unveiled its newest rack-scale system, which it claims offers 30x the tokens per second per user compared with graphics processing units.
Called the Cerebras CS-4, the system packs three wafer-scale WSE-3 Turbo processors, which the company says are the largest AI semiconductors ever built, packing 4 trillion transistors.
Cerebras' systems are designed for AI inference, running AI models, rather than training them. They use a kind of memory called static random-access memory (SRAM) rather than dynamic random-access memory (DRAM).
SRAM is far faster than DRAM, but much more complex, making it larger and more expensive than DRAM. That makes using SRAM all but impossible with your average pint-sized processor.
Cerebras' dinner plate-sized wafers provide the space needed to leverage SRAM.
What's more, the fact that Cerebras' processors are a single product means data has to travel shorter distances than, say, Nvidia or AMD's systems, which pair multiple chips that have to move data around more.
"Historically, fast inference meant using smaller and less capable models. Cerebras CS-4 delivers industry-leading speeds on the largest frontier models, fundamentally changing the paradigm," Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said in a statement.
"Every aspect of the design has been optimized to deliver the highest speeds with massive throughput. With the CS-4, AI is so fast that it fundamentally reshapes product experiences," he added.
In addition to its hardware, Cerebras also hosts its own AI cloud services running on the chips that it rents out to customers.
Cerebras went public in May at $185 per share and began trading at $350, but it has fallen precipitously since then. Shares were down more than 35% to $218 as of midday Tuesday.
The company's Q2 earnings results didn't help things either, as the company reported a loss per share of -$2.98 versus a profit of $1.91 in the same quarter last year.
And while the company offered better-than-anticipated Q3 guidance, it wasn't enough to impress investors on Wall Street.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X at @DanielHowley.
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