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OpenAI and Broadcom Announce Chip Designed for LLM Inference at Scale

The silicon race is heating up amid the struggle to keep up with demand.

OpenAI and Broadcom Announce Chip Designed for LLM Inference at Scale

TL;DR

  • OpenAI and Broadcom have announced a new chip named Jalapeño, tailored for large language model (LLM) inference.
  • The Jalapeño chip is an ASIC designed specifically for LLM inference, incorporating insights from OpenAI's researchers and future model roadmaps.
  • Early testing suggests Jalapeño will deliver significantly better performance per watt than current state-of-the-art solutions.
  • This collaboration aims to reduce OpenAI's dependence on external chip suppliers like Nvidia and enhance overall efficiency.
  • The custom silicon is also a response to the global compute crunch and high demand for data center capacity.
  • Both companies expect Jalapeño chips to be deployed in data centers by the end of the year.
  • The development and production of the chip took nine months.