BRN Discussion Ongoing

[Foxdog]

Not any more I bought a log splitter. Should have done it years ago. Just a brilliant piece of gear.

I concur FF those things totally rock - you've still got to cut them to rounds tho

 

[Wickedwolf]

Hi N,

You read my post correctly, it's an idea (of mine) and others on this forum whom I won't name also believe that the company has been, how shall I put this respectfully, very slow in having their results verified through an independent source.

Simon Thrope whom I have had rather close contact with for a number of years because he couldn't get answers to very fair and reasonable questions in my humble opinion from our company emailed me numerous times totally frustrated at not being able to get benchmarks, which I assume was because of security, despite being on the SAB at the time and sworn to confidentiality.

As you are very well aware of, Tony and a number of company staff read a number of these posts, so sometimes a stick has to be welded or an idea needs to be moved up in the priority order.

You and other Perth shareholders for example aren't privy to any information other than what has been made public, just like me.

The idea to publish results say next year for example would certainly silence all these other companies mouthing off about their "Neuromorphic" progress or more to the point, lack of!

What's your opinion on benchmarking N ?

Best regards......Chris

Hey Tech, very recently ( 2-3 months ago )I put BrainChip in contact with a lecturer from University College Dublin who was interested in assessing BrainChips performance capabilities. I specifically got in contact with this lecturer as he had recently released a book reviewing and benchmarking various vibrational analysis methods so thought Akida would be a good fit for his research. He was keen and I assumed win / win as he gets access to best in class technology and BrainChip get an independent performance assignment. So far BrainChip have declined to take up the offer. I feel your frustration.

 

[wilzy123]

So far BrainChip have declined to take up the offer

Probably not in the best interests of Brainchip, or its shareholders, to pander to every academic that would like to put a new toy into their next research article that will never see the light of day outside of academia.

 

[Wickedwolf]

Probably not in the best interests of Brainchip, or its shareholders, to pander to every academic that would like to put a new toy into their next research article that will never see the light of day outside of academia.

BrainChip confirmed that they were keen to engage, just didn’t follow up

 

[Wags]

Possibly the date aligning with 4C.

I wouldn't be surprised of the 27th Jan 2023 US time, our 28th being a Wed. The 31st is a Sat. Based on the past, the Wed before is not uncommon, but all just guesswork of-course.
Ive been absent and way behind on reading, sorry if already posted.
Keep smiling all.

 

[Fact Finder]

Probably not in the best interests of Brainchip, or its shareholders, to pander to every academic that would like to put a new toy into their next research article that will never see the light of day outside of academia.

Yes,

and if Brainchip is engaging in Benchmarking,

and if that is being done through just say Carnegie Mellon,

and if just say they have struck a deal where they will give the Carnegie Mellon academics the first right of publication to dramatically reduce the cost,

well if this is what they are doing then it would seem an entirely reasonable and responsible approach.

I have long desired that there be independent benchmarking undertaken but have remained silent as I could understand that until complete patent coverage was in place giving out the technology for this purpose would carry an unnecessary risk to the company and shareholders.

My opinion only DYOR
FF

AKIDA BALLISTA

 

[wilzy123]

well if this is what they are doing then it would seem an entirely reasonable and responsible approach.

Yes, this would be the only sensible reason for pursuing this at this time.

 

[wilzy123]

BrainChip confirmed that they were keen to engage, just didn’t follow up

When you're out to make a name for yourself, time is particularly precious and front of mind.

 

[Wickedwolf]

Yes,

and if Brainchip is engaging in Benchmarking,

and if that is being done through just say Carnegie Mellon,

and if just say they have struck a deal where they will give the Carnegie Mellon academics the first right of publication to dramatically reduce the cost,

well if this is what they are doing then it would seem an entirely reasonable and responsible approach.

I have long desired that there be independent benchmarking undertaken but have remained silent as I could understand that until complete patent coverage was in place giving out the technology for this purpose would carry an unnecessary risk to the company and shareholders.

My opinion only DYOR
FF

AKIDA BALLISTA

Possible…however if as Tech has highlighted, if Simon Thorp has been pushing for this benchmarking for years I doubt the recent engagement with Carnegie Mellon is the reason.

 

[Fact Finder]

Possible…however if as Tech has highlighted, if Simon Thorp has been pushing for this benchmarking for years I doubt the recent engagement with Carnegie Mellon is the reason.

If Simon Thorpe had been pressing for years and if I am correct about patents being finalised he was pressing when as we all know at least 27 patents had still to be finalised and lodged.

Simon Thorpe is no longer on the SAB so was he meddling in management beyond the proper scope of his role?

Carnegie Mellon is not suggested by me as the reason behind why the benchmarking may or may not be being undertaken but as an example of a reason why Brainchip may not be following up on your efforts.

Apart from anything else choosing an academic in the UK might not play well with the US Silicon Valley tech companies they are selling too as well as a US academic at a well known American University may be received.

What I am arguing against is your decision to condemn Brainchip’s perceived lack of action when you cannot be in possession of the full facts.

Did you communicate directly with the CEO and Board of Brainchip and present your idea directly to them or did you take your approach to investor relations?

Was your idea placed on a Board agenda for consideration?

Far to many unknowns.

My opinion only DYOR
FF

AKIDA BALLISTA

 

[Fact Finder]

I concur FF those things totally rock - you've still got to cut them to rounds tho

Have you heard of this thing called a chainsaw?

 

[equanimous]

Yes,

and if Brainchip is engaging in Benchmarking,

and if that is being done through just say Carnegie Mellon,

and if just say they have struck a deal where they will give the Carnegie Mellon academics the first right of publication to dramatically reduce the cost,

well if this is what they are doing then it would seem an entirely reasonable and responsible approach.

I have long desired that there be independent benchmarking undertaken but have remained silent as I could understand that until complete patent coverage was in place giving out the technology for this purpose would carry an unnecessary risk to the company and shareholders.

My opinion only DYOR
FF

AKIDA BALLISTA

Benchmarking

 

[Wickedwolf]

If Simon Thorpe had been pressing for years and if I am correct about patents being finalised he was pressing when as we all know at least 27 patents had still to be finalised and lodged.

Simon Thorpe is no longer on the SAB so was he meddling in management beyond the proper scope of his role?

Carnegie Mellon is not suggested by me as the reason behind why the benchmarking may or may not be being undertaken but as an example of a reason why Brainchip may not be following up on your efforts.

Apart from anything else choosing an academic in the UK might not play well with the US Silicon Valley tech companies they are selling too as well as a US academic at a well known American University may be received.

What I am arguing against is your decision to condemn Brainchip’s perceived lack of action when you cannot be in possession of the full facts.

Did you communicate directly with the CEO and Board of Brainchip and present your idea directly to them or did you take your approach to investor relations?

Was your idea placed on a Board agenda for consideration?

Far to many unknowns.

My opinion only DYOR
FF

AKIDA BALLISTA

Well that escalated quickly

I’m not condemning anyone…highlighting that I among many others are frustrated that independent benchmarking has not been undertaken.
Lots of possible reasons for this but not buying it’s because of patents or British/ US rivalries. Will have to disagree on this one

 

[alwaysgreen]

So what is the general consensus? Yay or nay to snapdragon or are we hoping for more detail tomorrow?

I think we may be waiting another year.

 

[Rach2512]

That is music to my ears. Bring on the Xmas pork crackle. Thank you Slymeat

Why wait to Christmas, I cooked this up in my airfryer the other night

 

[TopCat]

So what is the general consensus? Yay or nay to snapdragon or are we hoping for more detail tomorrow?

I think we may be waiting another year.

You would think ,given the glitzy over the top presentation , if Akida was involved they would’ve been saying “ neuromorphic” at any given chance. We’ll have to wait.

 

[Rise from the ashes]

Why wait to Christmas, I cooked this up in my airfryer the other night

Nothing beats a charcoal spit though.

 

[FJ-215]

If Simon Thorpe had been pressing for years and if I am correct about patents being finalised he was pressing when as we all know at least 27 patents had still to be finalised and lodged.

Simon Thorpe is no longer on the SAB so was he meddling in management beyond the proper scope of his role?

Carnegie Mellon is not suggested by me as the reason behind why the benchmarking may or may not be being undertaken but as an example of a reason why Brainchip may not be following up on your efforts.

Apart from anything else choosing an academic in the UK might not play well with the US Silicon Valley tech companies they are selling too as well as a US academic at a well known American University may be received.

What I am arguing against is your decision to condemn Brainchip’s perceived lack of action when you cannot be in possession of the full facts.

Did you communicate directly with the CEO and Board of Brainchip and present your idea directly to them or did you take your approach to investor relations?

Was your idea placed on a Board agenda for consideration?

Far to many unknowns.

My opinion only DYOR
FF

AKIDA BALLISTA

Hi FF,

I think after all this time everyone just wants to see some numbers. For myself it's partly for reassurance but mostly so I can puff my chest out and say "See, told you so"

I can remember you arguing against Mike Davies calls for benchmarks in neuromorphic computing. Rightly so if Intel write the rules to suit Loihi.

One potential problem for benchmarking is what configuration of Akida do you use? On paper Akida has 1.2 M neurons and 10B synapses but they aren't hard and fast numbers. You can trade them off to suit your application. Unfortunately I had a computer crash a few months back and lost the copy of the email exchange between Peter and Trothlis. If memory serves Peter blew everyones' minds by claiming the upper level of neurons was approx. 6 million but BRN didn't publish that to avoid confusion.

To this point FF, your story about Anil's tweaks to NVISO to achieve monster frames per second.

It's a struggle being special!

 

[Rise from the ashes]

Hi FF,

I think after all this time everyone just wants to see some numbers. For myself it's partly for reassurance but mostly so I can puff my chest out and say "See, told you so"

I can remember you arguing against Mike Davies calls for benchmarks in neuromorphic computing. Rightly so if Intel write the rules to suit Loihi.

One potential problem for benchmarking is what configuration of Akida do you use? On paper Akida has 1.2 M neurons and 10B synapses but they aren't hard and fast numbers. You can trade them off to suit your application. Unfortunately I had a computer crash a few months back and lost the copy of the email exchange between Peter and Trothlis. If memory serves Peter blew everyones' minds by claiming the upper level of neurons was approx. 6 million but BRN didn't publish that to avoid confusion.

To this point FF, your story about Anil's tweaks to NVISO to achieve monster frames per second.

It's a struggle being special!

Pump this number into the toilet site 38685813
And that post will have a link to the pdf with the emails sent.

 

[Fullmoonfever]

Just on benchmarking & a bit of understanding....would appear we're no orphans

The Sounds Of The AI Benchmark War: Crickets

NVIDIA bested a near-empty field in the latest AI Benchmark derby. Where is everyone else?

www.forbes.com

The Sounds Of The AI Benchmark War: Crickets
Karl Freund
Contributor
Founder and Principal Analyst, Cambrian-AI Research LLC
Follow
Apr 6, 2022,01:00pm EDT

NVIDIA once again dominated a near-empty field of AI competitors in MLPerf Inference V2.0. Let’s explore why other chip companies don’t want to play.​

Industry standard benchmarks have been an important feature of the IT landscape for decades, with SPEC, TPC, and other organizations offering benchmark suites to help buyers understand what chips and systems are best for which workloads.

The AI benchmark organization MLCommons has done a great job collaborating across dozens of member companies to define a broad suite of training and inference benchmarks that represent the bulk of AI applications in the data center and the edge.

Where is everyone Else?​

While the number of contributors (NVIDIA, Qualcomm and system vendors) increased dramatically, and performance improved by up to 50%, the number of chip architectures being tested dropped to two: performance-leader NVIDIA and efficiency-leader Qualcomm. Intel demurred this time around, while AWS, Google, AMD, Intel Habana, Graphcore, Cerebras, SambaNova, Groq, Alibaba and Bidu decided to skip the fun with their own chips.

I’ve spoken to a few customers about their experience running inference on these novel platforms, and in general the results are promising. So why not publish and provide a public tabulation of which chips are good at which problems? There are several reasons:

1. The top reason is the lack of a good ROI. These benchmarks take a lot of engineering effort to run because most platforms will not run them well without optimizations. The effort could be better spent working with a live customer to close the deal.
2. Performing those optimizations will produce a better product, but publishing the results can risky. You don’t want to be slower than NVIDIA. Frankly we suspect everyone is slower than NVIDIA on a chip-to-chip basis. So one would have to find a different way to interpret the results, as Qualcomm has done by touting energy efficiency. But,...
3. Even if you have an angle, the arguments you make can easily be blunted. For example, a more energy-efficient chip sounds good, but if it is significantly slower, then a buyer may have to purchase more accelerators, reducing or even reversing the supposed advantage.
4. Apples to apples comparisons are next to impossible, even in a well managed benchmark effort like MLPerf. Pricing, for example, is not considered. Nor is ease of software porting and optimization. And not everyone needs or can afford a Ferrari anyway.
5. Did we mention that NVIDIA is hard to beat? Yeah, THAT. We count over 5000 results in the MLPerf Inference spreadsheet, with over 95% of them run on NVIDIA. The GPU leader simply overwhelms any startup that wants to pick a few cells and hope for the best.

So, what we end up with NVIDIA showing how much better they are than they were last year. While NVIDIA did not publish any “Hopper” benchmarks, preferring to await the AI Training regatta in six months, their engineers did publish results for the latest edge SOC, the Jetson Orin, besting its predecessor by 2 to 5X.

So, what is the outlook for MLCommons?​

I believe that MLCommons provides an extremely valuable service to the industry and will continue to do so. All AI chip vendors use the suite of inference and training benchmarks to help determine performance bottlenecks and to refine their software optimizations. End users can run these open source benchmarks themselves to determine which platform best meets their needs.

As for participation, I suspect Intel will rejoin the fray to tout their Sapphire Rapids CPU, which has significant AI acceleration on board, and hopefully their new Ponte Vecchio GPU now being installed at the DOE ARNL labs. And I expect more contributions from Graphcore as well, at least in training.

That being said, I doubt that others such as AMD and AWS will step up any time soon, but the Chinese vendors might see an opportunity to show off their silicon.
But let’s acknowledge that NVIDIA is just plain hard to beat; great engineers under a great leader can do, well, great things. Also, Qualcomm has amazing energy efficiency born from over a decade of smart phone chip development and research.

Regardless of the size of the public party, however, everyone will continue to benefit from the rich set of apps and data sets that MLCommons has helped the community develop. These are real applications that cover the waterfront of AI use cases, which in and of itself is a great value to the industry.