Why Is Japan Still Investing in Custom Floating Point Accelerators?

Summary

It has taken nearly two decades and an immense amount of work by millions of people for high performance computing to go mainstream with GenAI. And now, we live in a world where AI servers crammed with accelerators account for half of the money spent on systems worldwide. There is no law anywhere that says that accelerator has to be a GPU, although that has been the accelerator of choice by far because GPUs are, like CPUs, general purpose processors that are explicitly designed to support various kinds of workloads where high throughput vector processing and, with GenAI and some traditional HPC simulations that have been altered, tensor processing are highly prized. There is still room for something other than a GPU to accelerate HPC and AI applications, and Pezy Computing KK, whose very name is short for peta, exa, zetta, and yotta, like it is part of some kind of football chant for HPC and AI fans, has spent a decade and a half creating math accelerators that can do the same kinds of work as GPUs, but with a different architecture that aims to drive energy efficiency to its limits. This is exactly what you would expect for a company that was funded by Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), which is also funding the development of the “Monaka” Arm server CPU designed by Fujitsu that will be used in the “FugakuNext” supercomputer. The wonder is why FugakuNext doesn’t at least have some portions of its compute coming from Pezy SC accelerators . . . . Perhaps it will when FugakuNext is installed in 2029 or so. Naoya Hatta, a hardware engineer at Pezy Computing, presented the latest in a line of number-crunching accelerators that have been delivered since the Pezy-1 chip was launched in April 2012 after two years of development. Here is the table Hatta presented at Hot Chips 2025: And here is an expanded table with more features and analysis by us: That Pezy-1 chip, which is not shown in Hatta’s table above, had 512 RISC cores for...