AMD ACQUIRES AI CHIP STARTUP TAALAS TO BOOST INFERENCE PERFORMANCE BY ETCHING MODELS INTO SILICON

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

AMD has acquired AI chip company Taalas for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory approval. Taalas bakes model weights directly into silicon to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more. The company's first chip, the HC1, can serve Meta's Llama3.1 8B at a blistering 16,860 tokens a second, 48x faster than Nvidia's GPUs when it was announced last February.