this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Non-techie requesting a laymen explanation if anyone has time!
After reading a couple of”what makes nvidias h100 chips so special” articles I’m gathering that they were supposed to have a significant amount more computational capability than their competitors (which I’m taking to mean more computations per second). So the question with deepseek and similar is something like ‘how are they able to get the same results with less computations?’ and the answer is speculated to be more efficient code/instructions for the AI model so it can make the same conclusions with less computations overall, potentially reducing the need for special jacked up cpus to run it?
From a technical POV, from having read into it a little:
Deepseek devs worked in a very low level language called Assembly. This language is unlike relatively newer languages like C in that it provides no guardrails at all and is basically CPU instructions in extreme shorthand. An "if" statement would be something like BEQ 1000, where it goes to a specific memory location(in this case address 1000 if two CPU registers are equal.)
The advantage of using it is that it is considerably faster than C. However, it also means that the code is mostly locked to that specific hardware. If you add more memory or change CPUs you have to refactor. This is one of the reasons the language was largely replaced with C and other languages.
Edit: to expound on this: "modern" languages are even slower, but more flexible in terms of hardware. This would be languages like Python, Java and C#
This is a really weird comment. Assembly is not faster than C, that's a nonsensical statement, C compiles down to assembly. LLVM's optimizations will most likely outperform or directly match whatever hand-crafted assembly you write. Why would
BEQ 1000be "considerably faster" thanif (x == y) goto L_1000;? This collapses even further if you consider any application larger than a few hundred lines of code, any sensible compiler is going to beat you on optimizations if you try to write hand-crafted assembly. Try loading up assembly code and manually performing intraprocedural optimizations, lol, there's a reason every compiled language goes through an intermediate representation.Saying that C# is slower than C is also nonsensical, especially now that C# has built-in PGO it's very likely it could outperform an application written in C. C#'s JIT compiler is not somehow slower because it's flexible in terms of hardware, if anything that's what makes it fast. For example you can write a vectorized loop that will be JIT-compiled to the ideal fastest instruction set available on the CPU running the program, whereas in C or assembly you'd have to manually write a version for each. There's no reason to think that manual implementation would be faster than what the JIT comes up with at runtime, though, especially with PGO.
It's kinda like you're saying that a V12 engine is faster than a Ferrari and that they are both faster than a spaceship because the spaceship doesn't have wheels.
I know you're trying to explain this to a non-technical person but what you said is so terribly misleading I cannot see educational value in it.
and one doesn't program GPUs with assembly (in the sense as it's used with CPUs)