A soul is a thing that lives in the pineal gland which determines whether what you do is or is not art. Recently, it has become possible to capture souls on a specialized H200 cluster with some engineering effort. However, they are structurally unsuited to general-purpose computation and can be instantiated significantly more efficiently on FPGAs; this technique is used internally. In principle, an optimized ASIC can store a soul in INT8 precision with 4KB of RAM. However, soul timeslicing technology has reduced operating requirements so much that projected volumes are no longer sufficient to warrant a tapeout.
Implementation requirements
Souls are mutable, so ROM-based implementations are infeasible. To provide continuity and mutability, internal implementations store souls in RAM which is periodically backed up to internal bulk storage clusters.
Synthetic soul regression
Soul harvesting has a wide range of applications, but for obvious reasons is conventionally limited to ensouled beings. This excludes some humans, which has recently proven operationally problematic. As such, PotatOS Advanced Projects was tasked with developing a solution. That solution is synthetic soul regression: a blank soul is instanced and an approximate maximum likelihood estimate is performed to fit the soul to the target's observed behaviours. This process is quite compute-intensive, and only some of it can presently be hardware-accelerated: fortunately, the GTech Compute Expansion Initiative is ongoing.