Cerebras Systems’ Chips May Be 15X Faster Than Some of Nvidia’s Blackwell Models, but Nvidia Has 2 Distinct Advantages Artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) went public on May 14 amid much buzz.
The stock popped by 68% on its first day of trading — a sign, according to experts, that the AI trade is alive and well
The hype around this initial public offering makes sense, given that Cerebras is competing with major chip designers like Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and AMD, both of which have performed extraordinarily well in recent years. Investors were likely even more excited to read in Cerebras’ registration statement that the company says its chips are 15 times faster than those of leading competitors. While that’s undoubtedly intriguing, Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) still have two distinct advantages over Cerebras’ chips.
Why Cerebras’ chips are different While most chip designers start the process of making their chips by cutting large silicon wafers into many small pieces that will eventually become individual chips, Cerebras uses an entire silicon wafer to make one massive chip: Its wafer-scale engines (WSEs) are 58 times larger than Nvidia’s Blackwell 200 processors.Some news outlets have described Cerebras’ chips as being the size of a dinner plate. Larger chips certainly have some advantages in data centers because more memory and processing power can be packed onto them. Cerebras says its WSE-3 model has 250 times more on-chip memory than Nvidia’s B200 model and 2,625 times more memory bandwidth.