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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (1571319)	11/11/2025 2:22:26 PM
From: Eric	Respond to of 1572326

T And I guarantee anyone that Musk doesn't know WTF he's talking about WRT integer vs. floating-point processing. I totally agree. E

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (1571319)	11/11/2025 5:05:30 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572326

My understanding is that the weights in AI benefit from a large dynamic range and precision is not nearly as important. So it maps better to floats than ints. And why programmable GPUs work so well, same sort of thing in graphics. They use 8 and even 4 bit floats for at least some AI work because of this. So yeah, you could probably do the same thing with big enough integers. I haven't seen a study comparing efficiencies, but I'd be surprised if 256 bit integers are going to be that much better than an 8 bit float, for example. I won't say that if it were, somebody would've thought of it by now because sometimes things get overlooked, but then again... As to the emulation with two integers, well in the sense that the exponent and the mantissa can be considered integers, he is right. But the hardware doesn't treat them that way and especially for multiplies and divides, they don't have to be processed together. Now additions and subtractions are slower because you have to normalize them first. But, at least when I was doing neural nets in school, adds and subtracts were much rarer. So yeah, he either really dumbed things down or has no idea about what he is talking about.