OpenAI’s Jalapeño ASICs are deployed alongside AMD EPYC ‘Turin’ CPUs as hosts, not Nvidia's Vera

OpenAI’s new Jalapeño ASIC is being deployed internally alongside AMD EPYC Turin hosts, each with 1.5TB of memory. SemiAnalysis described the rack-scale deployment of Jalapeño following the reveal of the chip, which we asked Richard Ho, VP and Head of Hardware at OpenAI, about in an interview. Ho told us that the decision to use Turin was “pragmatic,” describing Nvidia’s new Vera CPU as “a little bit behind… on that maturity level.”

“The way we approached that design was really in terms of de-risking and being able to do that design fast. Vera, as a standalone, is a little bit behind on that maturity level. The Turing device is strong. It did what we needed to do, and partly our partners had some experience with it,” Ho told Tom’s Hardware Premium. “For the Jalapeño program, we were trying to make very pragmatic decisions. …