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I wish I could work in some team designing these chips. Maia is probably my dream product to work on. Super new, super cool and one of it’s kind.
> Microsoft said it does not plan to sell the chips Add it to the list of things you can't buy at any price, and can only rent. That list is getting pretty long, especially if you count "any electronic device you can't fully control or modify".
Sounds like an opportunity for hardware startups.
> Microsoft said it does not plan to sell the chips Add it to the list of things you can't buy at any price, and can only rent. That list is getting pretty long, especially if you count "any electronic device you can't fully control or modify".
Google does the same thing with their TPUs. The masses will be left with the NVidia monopoly, while large companies will be able to free themselves from that.
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.
> Amazon announced theirs last year Inferentia (inf1) was GA'ed in December 2019 so it's actually almost 4 years old now. The trainium (trn1) chips and the Inferentia 2 (inf2) refresh is indeed 1 year old though.
NVIDIA should start offer AI cloud, buy DigitalOcean, counterattack microsoft, google, amazon, since they are attacking NVIDIA's territory.
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.
> Amazon announced theirs last year Inferentia (inf1) was GA'ed in December 2019 so it's actually almost 4 years old now. The trainium (trn1) chips and the Inferentia 2 (inf2) refresh is indeed 1 year old though.
Another AI chip made by TSMC, they make all of them?
Most of the value of chips is in their design, which is owned by different entities. Manufacturing is important too (only TSMC can make these advanced designs at scale and at lower costs than the competition).
The question I have is if Cobalt has any innovations in its design, or if its just bog-standard ARM Neoverse cores. Its not too big of a deal to download ARM's latest designs and slap them into... erm... your designs. But hopefully Microsoft added value somewhere along the road (The Uncore remains important: cache sizes, communications, and the like).
> Microsoft said it does not plan to sell the chips Add it to the list of things you can't buy at any price, and can only rent. That list is getting pretty long, especially if you count "any electronic device you can't fully control or modify".
Google does the same thing with their TPUs. The masses will be left with the NVidia monopoly, while large companies will be able to free themselves from that.
If any of these companies truly made competitive silicon they absolutely would commercialize it.
I suspect they aren't as competitive as the press releases hold them to be, and this Microsoft entrant is likely to follow the same path. Like Google, Tesla, Amazon and others it seems mostly an initiative to negotiate discounts from nvidia.
It would be great if there were really competition. When Google was hyped about their Tensor chips they did have a period where they were looking to commercialize it, and there are some pretty crappy USB products they sell.
I wish I could work in some team designing these chips. Maia is probably my dream product to work on. Super new, super cool and one of it’s kind.
I mean that looks cool and exciting if it is really small colocated team if one is lead engineer or director of large team of engineers so that they can learn do things that interest them and assign boring/routine work to individuals. Otherwise it would be just another job where people work on assigned JIRA stories and go home in evening.
> Microsoft said it does not plan to sell the chips Add it to the list of things you can't buy at any price, and can only rent. That list is getting pretty long, especially if you count "any electronic device you can't fully control or modify".
Google does the same thing with their TPUs. The masses will be left with the NVidia monopoly, while large companies will be able to free themselves from that.
My bet: if it really becomes clear what capabilities an AI accelerator chip needs and lots of people want to run (or even train) AIs on their own computers, AI accelerators will appear at the market. This is how capitalism typically works.
My further bet: these AI accelerators will initially come from China.
Just look at the history of Bitcoin: initially the blocks were mined on CPUs, but then the miners switched to GPUs and "everybody" was complaining about increasing GPU prices because of all the Bitcoin mining. At some moment, Bitcoin mining ASICs appeared from China and after those spread, GPUs were not attractive anymore for Bitcoin mining (of course the cryptocurrency fans who bought the GPUs for mining attempted to use their investment for mining other cryptocurrencies).