'Bigger is better' is back for hardware – without any obvious benefits

Software was supposed to eat the world, but it's scarcely snacking on today's monstrous silicon

Column  When I first saw an image of the 'wafer-scale engine' from AI hardware startup Cerebras, my mind rejected it. The company's current product is about the size of an iPad and uses 2.6 trillion transistors that contribute to over 850,000 cores.…