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Really cool. I'm wondering: what background did you need to be able to think of the question that resulted in this project?

I know you said you're involved in some retrogaming and were experimenting, but as someone who works in a world where hardware is pretty heavily abstracted away, even if I got into retrogaming I don't know that I'd consider that there may be a systems improvement lying around. Beyond the creative aspect, it feels like there is some systems and hardware background that helped put the idea together (and I'd be interested to go learn about of that systems/hardware knowledge myself).

 help



This was the experiment itself https://github.com/xaskasdf/ps2-llm

The idea was basically to run a llm on a ps2, then I ran into some problems as the 32mb ram cap with 4mb vram cap; so I had to figure out a way to stream layers on the forward pass. Given that ps2 manages to give instructions directly to the vram that's capable of 32bit addresses, it gave an insane amount of tok/s, then I wondered if I could do the same on my puter


I wonder too, DMA plays a huge role in most older gaming consoles when the CPUs were far more sluggish.

Perhaps that's what made them think to try.

Perhaps the current batch of smart memory cards which on the PS2 I believe have quite complex DMA capabilities to stream from the SD card game data.


Why not the PS5? That's when games started streaming assets straight from the NVME SSD to the GPU. In this case the assets are weights.

Actually I'm thinking about buyin an AMD BC-250 that's bassically a ps5 with pcie factor format; and it's linux capable by default, maybe next month

Just because he mentioned retro gaming.

Otherwise DMA is everywhere.

In the PS5 case since it uses unified memory it's not quite the same as say an GBA streamed from a flash cart to video RAM.




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