[HN Gopher] Show HN: Razer x Lambda Tensorbook
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       Show HN: Razer x Lambda Tensorbook
        
       Hi all, long time lurker, first time poster.  I want to share with
       you all something we've been working on for a while at Lambda: the
       Razer x Lambda Tensorbook:
       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMh6Dhq7P_Q  But before I tell you
       about it, I want to make this all about me, because I built this
       for me.  See, while I'm genuinely interested in hearing from the
       community what you think as this is the culmination of a lot of
       effort from a lot of people across so many different fields
       (seriously, the number of folks across manufacturing, engineering,
       design, logistics, and marketing who have had to work together to
       launch this is nuts), I really just want to tie the larger
       motivations for Tensorbook as a product back to a personal
       narrative to explain why I'm so proud.  So, flashback to 2018, and
       I'm a hardware engineer focusing on the compute system at Lyft's
       autonomous vehicle (AV) program, Level5 (L5). Here was a project
       that that would save lives, that would improve the human condition,
       that was all ready to go. I saw my role as coming in to product-
       ize, to take what was close to the finish line and get it over it.
       The disappointment was pretty brutal when I realized just how wrong
       I was.  It's one thing to nod along when reading Knuth write
       "premature optimization is the root of all evil"; it's another to
       experience it firsthand.  At Lyft L5 I thought I would be applying
       specialized inference accelerators (Habana, Groq, Graphcore, etc.)
       into the vehicle compute system. Instead, the only requirement that
       mattered org-wide was: "Don't do anything that slows down the
       perception team". Forget testing silicon with the potential to
       reduce power requirements by 10x, I was lucky to get a willing ear
       to hear my case for changing a flag in the TensorFlow runtime to
       perform inference at FP16 instead of FP32.  Don't get me wrong,
       there were a multitude of other difficult technical challenges to
       solve outside of the deep learning ones that were gating, but I had
       underestimated just how not-ready the CNNs for object detection and
       classification were. Something I thought was a solved problem was
       very much not, and ultimately resulted in my team and others
       building a 5,000 watt monster of server (+ power distribution, +
       thermals, + chassis, etc etc) that took up an entire rear row of
       seating. I'm happy to talk about that experience in the comments
       because I have a lot of fond memories from my time there.  Anyway,
       the takeaway I have from Lyft, and my first motivation here is that
       there is no such thing as over-provisioning or too much compute in
       a deep learning engineer's mind. Anything less than the most
       possible is a detriment to their workflow. I still truly believe
       AVs will save lives; so by extension, enabling deep learning
       engineers enables AVs enables improvement to the human condition.
       Transitive property, :thumbsup:  So moving on, my following role in
       industry was characterized by working closely with the least
       technical people I have ever had the opportunity to work with in my
       life. And I mean opportunity genuinely, because doing so gave me so
       much perspective on the things that you and I here probably take
       for granted. (How do we know that Ctrl+Alt+T will open a terminal?
       Why does `touch` make a file? How do I quit vim?)  So, the takeaway
       from that experience, and motivation #2 for me is that computers
       can be so unaccessible in surprising ways. I have a deep respect
       and appreciation for Linux, and I want others to see things the
       same way, so anything I can do to make easier the process of "self-
       serving" or "bootstrapping" to my level of understanding, is
       something worth doing to me.  So, with those two personal
       motivations outlined, I present to you, for your consideration, the
       Razer x Lambda Tensorbook. A laptop with a no-compromise approach
       to speeds-and-feeds and shipping with OEM support for Ubuntu.
       sincerely, Vinay. Product Marketing @ Lambda
        
       Author : vimeh
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2022-04-12 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
       | daviddever23box wrote:
       | Tell us about the choice of Razer Blade 15 (2021) as the platform
       | (or, as we refer to it, CH570).
        
       | ganoushoreilly wrote:
       | https://lambdalabs.com/blog/lambda-teams-up-with-razer-to-la...
       | 
       | Here's a link with more info for anyone else curious.
        
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       (page generated 2022-04-12 23:02 UTC)