2019-08-24 The Economist Latin America

54 Business The EconomistAugust 24th 2019

A

happy customerisa repeatcustom-

er,orsothesayinggoes.Buthowcan

a businesskeepclientssatisfied?The

answer,accordingtoa recentstudy,isto

treatemployeeswell.Glassdoor,a web-

sitewhichletworkersassessemployers,

lookedbackovertherecordsof 293 com-

paniesacross 13 industriesbetween 2008

and2018.It thenstudiedthelinkbe-

tweenemployeesatisfaction,basedon

itsownratings,andtheAmericanCus-

tomerSatisfactionIndex,a benchmark

gaugeofshoppers’sentiment.

A one-pointimprovementinGlass-

door’srating(ona five-pointscale)trans-

latedintoa statisticallysignificant1.3-

pointincreaseincustomersatisfaction

(ratedfromzeroto100).Asmightbe

expected,thelinkwasstrongestinin-

dustrieswhereworkershavethemost

directcontactwithcustomers,suchas

retail,restaurantsandtourism.Insuch

trades,a one-pointgaininemployee

satisfactionratingraisedthatofcustom-

ersby3.2points(seecharts).Companies

withhighscoresforbothemployeeand

customersatisfactionincludeSouthwest

Airlines,TraderJoe’s,a grocer,andHilton

Hotels.Thelinkislessstrongamong

manufacturingandenergyfirms.

Morepertinenttobosses,Glassdoor

alsocitesa studyshowingthathigher

customersatisfactionleadstohigher

marketvalue.Sohereisa tipforchief

executives:benicetothefront-linestaff

andyourbonusmightbebigger.

Cangetsomesatisfaction

Productivity

Howtokeepyourcustomershappy

Pleasepleaseme

Source:Glassdoor *AmericanCustomerSatisfactionIndex,maximum=100 †Glassdoorrating,maximum=5

UnitedStates,companysatisfactionratings,2008-18

Retail Manufacturing

Travel&tourism Oil,gas,energy

&utilities

Selectedindustry Allindustries

Employeesatisfaction†

Customersatisfaction*

2345

50

60

70

80

90

Employeesatisfaction†

Customersatisfaction*

2345

50

60

70

80

90

Employeesatisfaction†

Customersatisfaction*

2345

50

60

70

80

90

Employeesatisfaction†

Customersatisfaction*

2345

50

60

70

80

90

C

omputer brainsare tiny rectangles,

becoming tinier with each new genera-

tion. Or so it used to be. These days Andrew

Feldman, the boss of Cerebras, a startup,

pulls a block of Plexiglas out of his back-

pack. Baked into it is a microprocessor the

size of letter paper. “It’s the world’s big-

gest,” he says proudly, rattling off its tech-

nical specs: 400,000 cores (sub-brains), 18

gigabytes of memory and 1.2trn transistors.

That is, respectively, about 78, 3,000 and 57

times more than the largest existing pro-

cessor from Nvidia, a chipmaker.

Cerebras is leading a shift in semicon-

ductors that was on display at Hot Chips, an

industry gathering at Stanford University,

where startups like Mr Feldman’s and

giants such as Nvidia and Intel showed off

their new silicon wares on August 19th.

Cramming ever more transistors on

standard chips—twice as many every 18

months, according to Moore’s Law, which

has turned from an empirical observation

to an industry benchmark—used to be the

way to go. But with transistors now the size

of dozens of atoms, improvements have

become less predictable. And with the

spread of artificial intelligence (ai), de-

mand for computing power has grown by

more than 300,000 times for certain appli-

cations between 2012 and 2018, according

to some estimates, much faster than the 16

times or so ordained by Moore’s Law.

As a result, chipmakers are now dialling

up performance by, among other things,

increasing the size of processors that in-

hale data to train ai services, from facial

recognition to drug discovery. Cerebras has

pushed this approach to the limit: its chip

is the biggest that can be cut from the larg-

est available wafers, the round sheets of sil-

icon onto which transistors are etched.

To get there, the firm had to overcome

more than one technical hurdle. One is de-

fects: every wafer has some, so Mr Feld-

man’s team had to find a way to bypass

faulty cores. Another is cooling: water

pumped through tiny pipes carries away

the great heat that cores generate. Cerebras

has also built a specialised computer for its

new chip which it claims will deliver 150

times more number-crunching power than

the best server based on graphics-process-

ing units, today’s ai workhorses.

Those attending Hot Chips were pass-

ably impressed when Cerebras presented

its new processor. But the biggest hurdle

for Cerebras may be economic, not techni-

cal, says Linley Gwennap of Microprocessor

Report, an industry newsletter.

One question is whether other firms

that have a huge demand for computing

power, including banks and oil giants, will

buy such ai supercomputers, instead of

having their data crunched in a cloud. And

Mr Feldman has yet to convince big provid-

ers of cloud computing, such as Amazon

Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google

Cloud, that Cerebras’s superior perfor-

mance relative to machines packed with

Nvidia chips outweighs the extra costs, for

instance in higher power consumption.

Though the name Cerebras is meant to

echo cerebrum, the largest part of the hu-

man brain, it also bears a resemblance to

Cerberus, the giant three-headed dog

guarding the entrance to Hades. The indus-

try’s more fearsome beasts, whether chip-

makers or computer manufacturers, may

need little convincing to gobble it up while

it is still a puppy, as they have done with

other ai-chip pioneers before it. 7

PALO ALTO

Will the chunkiest ai chip on the

planet find buyers?

Semiconductors

Growing smartly