Intel ARM Nvidia pushes draft specification, wants to unify AI data exchange format

However, many companies in the industry, including Intel, ARM and Nvidia, are looking to the 8-bit FP8 floating-point processing format as the best choice. In a blog post, Shar Narasimhan, director of product marketing at NVIDIA, noted that the FP8 floating-point format offers comparable accuracy to half-precision floating-point with "significant" speedups in use cases such as computer vision and image generation systems.

NVIDIA, ARM and Intel said they will make the FP8 floating-point processing format an open standard that other companies can use without a license. The three companies describe FP8 in detail in a white paper. Narasimhan said the specifications will be submitted to the technical standardization organization IEEE to see if the FP8 format can become a common standard for the artificial intelligence industry.

Narasimhan said, "We believe that a common interchange format will lead to rapid advances in hardware and software platforms, improving interoperability and thus advancing AI computing."

Of course, the reason the three companies have gone to great lengths to push for the FP8 format to become a universal swap format is also due to their own research. NVIDIA's GH100 Hopper architecture already supports the FP8 format, as does Intel's Gaudi2 artificial intelligence training chipset.

But a common FP8 format would also benefit competitors such as SambaNova, AMD, Groq, IBM, Graphcore and Cerebras, all of which have experimented with or adopted the FP8 format in their development of AI systems. Simon Knowles, co-founder and CTO of Graphcore, a developer of artificial intelligence systems, wrote in a blog post in July of this year that "the advent of 8-bit floating-point numbers has brought huge advantages to AI computing in terms of processing performance and efficiency. Knowles also called it "an opportunity" for the industry to define a "single open standard" that would be much better than having multiple formats competing with each other.