Live data from Hacker News

The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud

theverge.com

11–20 of 282 posts

Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud

#11
post #3

It 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.

I would say software is very important. We already have tons of different models, standards, library, etc. I usually have smooth experience if I am using NVDA, but any other variation, I have to spend some times to get things started.

Supporting the common librarires that I use is very important for me to chose the cloud platform.

Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud

#12
Damn, Microsoft is playing all sides of this, huh.

Within a ten minute window:

- Satya announced GPT-4 runs (at least partly) on a new AMD offering

- Satya announced an in-house chip for ML acceleration

- Satya brings NVidia CEO Jensen Huang on stage

they've got every horse in the race, huh

(disclaimer, I work for MS but all the stuff talked about here far is waaaay above my paygrade haha, and all brand new info to me)

Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud

#13
post #3

It 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.

Considering that Jensen is on stage with Satya at the moment sharing the keynote of Microsoft Ignite, I suspect NVIDIA won't be going anywhere anytime soon.

Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud

#14

Arm in inevitable for the server. It's interesting how now days, efficiency/power consumption is a consideration over pure raw performance.

I genuinely don't see how x86 architecture will continue to survive the next 10 years. It will of course take longer to change home desktop users to new architectures; they will be the last segment to switch, but it seems all but inevitable.

BTW, I'm not even speaking to whether x86 can compete at the same power per watt... I think it just won't make sense financially to be out of sync with the industry.

Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud

#17

So 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.

I don't know much about the software-side of nvidia/gpus + LLMs. Can you catch me up on what software they've created means as a differentiator? Is that CUDA? How does this relate to things like tensorflow with Google's chips?

Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud

#20

Arm in inevitable for the server. It's interesting how now days, efficiency/power consumption is a consideration over pure raw performance.

Most of the nodes I see every day are still x86. But I’m in an academic environment, maybe things are slower over here. Does ARM actually seem to have legs outside? (Other than, like, nodes subsidized by Amazon’s wish to in-house everything they can).
Post reply on HN