AI Training Benchmarks Push Hardware Limits

Since 2018, the consortium MLCommons has been running a sort of Olympics for AI training. The competition, called MLPerf, consists of a set of tasks for training specific AI models, on predefined datasets, to a certain accuracy. Essentially, these tasks, called benchmarks, test how well a hardware and low-level software configuration is set up to train a particular AI model.

Twice a year, companies put together their submissions—usually, clusters of CPUs and GPUs and software optimized for them—and…