The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
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Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#2So does NVIDIA, just turns out NVIDIA can profit more because of their software and the software ecosystem around it adds so much value, nobody can compete.
It's gonna take a lot of work and many years to approach that. Even by leveraging AI. And by diverging with their own chips, they're gonna miss out on the mainstream.
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#3It was only a matter of time. Google announced theirs years ago, Amazon announced theirs last year.
Right now NVIDIA has the lead because they have the better software, but they can't make the chips fast enough. Will be interesting to see if their better software continues to keep them in the lead or if people are more interested in getting the capacity in any form.
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#4Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#5Not a lot of information about the chips yet. About 100B transistors in the AI chip. For comparison, an RTX 4090 has 76B, and an H100 has about 80B. So the Maia chip is pretty massive.
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#6This seems a little unclear to me. They're saying this isn't meant to compete with Nvidia, and that it's more of an ARM based CPU?
So more of an SOC a la AWS graviton or Apple Silicon than a pure GPU?
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#7This seems a little unclear to me. They're saying this isn't meant to compete with Nvidia, and that it's more of an ARM based CPU? So more of an SOC a la AWS graviton or Apple Silicon than a pure GPU?
There's two separate chip announcements here. One is a ML accelerator (Maia). The other is an ARM CPU (Cobalt).
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#8“Microsoft gave few technical details that would allow gauging the chips' competitiveness versus those of traditional chipmakers”
Clearly. All I got was “using ARM IP” and “TSMC N5”
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#9Looking over another story on this at https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-unveils-first-ai-chi..., Cobalt seems to be a general purpose ARM CPU.
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#10Arm in inevitable for the server. It's interesting how now days, efficiency/power consumption is a consideration over pure raw performance.