AI Hardware & Compute¶
The silicon and systems that make modern AI possible — and the single biggest practical constraint on what gets built.
AI Hardware & Compute is one of the core areas in the AI University map of AI. Explore the diagram, then dive into each topic — every subtopic grows into its own deep-dive over time.
flowchart TB
MODEL[Model + data] --> TRAIN{{Training cluster<br/>GPUs / TPUs}}
TRAIN --> CKPT[(Checkpoint)] --> OPT[Quantize / compile]
OPT --> SERVE[[Inference server]] --> APP[/Application/]
Key topics¶
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GPUs, TPUs & accelerators
Why massively parallel hardware dominates deep learning, and the chips that run it.
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The memory wall
HBM, bandwidth, and why memory — not raw FLOPs — is often the real bottleneck.
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CUDA & kernels
The software stack that maps math onto hardware; fused kernels like FlashAttention.
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Quantization & precision
FP16, BF16, INT8 and 4-bit — trading numerical precision for speed and memory.
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Inference optimization
Batching, KV-caching, speculative decoding, and serving models efficiently.
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Scaling laws & cost
How compute, data, and model size trade off — and what a training run actually costs.
Related areas¶
Deep Learning · Data & MLOps · Edge & On-Device AI
Learn this properly
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