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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

#41

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #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 m…

Microsoft really likes being valued as a growth stock...

Obviously they're going to play every angle.

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

#44

Post by aleph_minus_one »

lnsru wrote: post #19

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 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.

You likely became bewitched by their glamorous marketing side. I'd bet that the real work that the team does is very similar to the work that basically every ASIC design team does.

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

#45

Post by jimmaswell »

wargames wrote: post #14
monlockandkey wrote: post #10

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.

I care vastly more about raw performance than energy usage for my home systems. I also have good reasons to care about the best single core performance. I don't see x86 going away that fast.

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

#46

Post by bonton89 »

ShamelessC wrote: post #36
belval wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yikes those names are horrible.

They'll sound better after we hear Microsoft's names.

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

#47

Post by machinekob »

wmf wrote: post #33
ronsor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MI300 is coming.

This time AMD for sure will fight with NV (its only failed 20 times already copium)

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

#48

Post by belval »

ShamelessC wrote: post #36
belval wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yikes those names are horrible.

Why? Inferentia => inference, trainium => training. Given the usually naming of AWS product, having one where the name roughly matches what it does is pretty good?

TPU is pretty good but is associated with Google. MTIA is an acronym but still maps to what the chip does. ~~"Cobalt" is worse as it does not mean anything~~ . Cobalt is the CPU chip, MAIA is the accelerator so this matches Meta's naming.

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

#50

Post by magnio »

jimmaswell wrote: post #45
wargames wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I care vastly more about raw performance than energy usage for my home systems. I also have good reasons to care about the best single core performance. I don't see x86 going away that fast.

FWIW, the current king of single core Geekbench is the M3 chips. Even the base M3 scores as high as the i9-14900K and higher than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, at less than half their TDPs.
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