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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.
https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1168/am...
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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).
It's going to take time, but momentum is seriously starting to build up now. Laptop market going to pick up with Snapdragon X and cloud providers are going to continue with more powerful designs.
Because right now I'm looking to save up for a majorly spec'd Apple MacbookPro just to be able to do this stuff on a *nix operating system. I have no great love for Apple but the abilities of their chips and the vast software offerings are tempting this Linux guy in that direction.
Something that Microsoft cannot seem to do any more. I used Windows from 3.x-WinME; NT3.51-WinXP, getting off before Vista. What I've seen since then has done nothing to tempt me back to their side. Since I unfortunately must deal with Windows 10 at work, it definitely reinforces my distaste for their systems....
So despite thinking OSX has been rendered ugly for the past ten years now, I'm still thinking heavily in that direction, even with the high costs. Snapdragon X sounds nice enough but I have zero expectations based on past behavior at those getting decent Linux support any time soon. And no one else seems to even be trying, that one Thinkpad aside.
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.
Because different than the ARM chip also announced in the same Ignite event, Microsoft doesn't exactly "need" nor can fully utilize an AI chip. Google trains its foundational models (e.g. Gemini) on its own TPU hardware but Microsoft's is heavily reliant on OpenAI for its generative AI serving needs.
Unless Microsoft is planning to acquire OpenAI fully and switch over from Nvidia hardware...
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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.
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.
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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.
A bit surprised to see Jensen's stage appearance since clearly Microsoft's success with its own AI chips means less business for Nvidia's chips. Because different than the ARM chip also announced in the same Ignite event, Microsoft doesn't exactly "need" nor can fully utilize an AI chip. Google trains its foundational models (e.g. Gemini) on its own TPU hardware but Microsoft's is heavily reliant on OpenAI for its ge…
They're going to play a modified version of the old Rareware trick.
It's also a pretty great game to buy up OpenAI equity, which ultimately gets spent on Microsoft compute. Two birds, one stone.
“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”
"Manufactured on a 5-nanometer TSMC process, Maia has 105 billion transistors — around 30 percent fewer than the 153 billion found on AMD’s own Nvidia competitor, the MI300X AI GPU. “Maia supports our first implementation of the sub 8-bit data types, MX data types, in order to co-design hardware and software,” says Borkar. “This helps us support faster model training and inference times.”"
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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.
nvidia is a $1.2 trillion dollar company (the 6th largest company by cap), and at this point AI is a huge component of that wealth. It has appreciated by 3.3x since just the beginning of this year. 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 th…
Now, I know that what you actually mean is selling the chips themselves to third parties :) But it's not obvious that there's any point to it given their already existing model of commercializing the chips.
First, literally everyone is already supply-constrained due to limits on high end foundry capacity. Nvidia has a ton of capacity because they're one of TSMC's top two customers. The big tech companies will have much smaller allocations which are used up just supplying their own clouds. Even if the demand for buying these chips rather than renting were there, they just don't have the chips to sell without losing out on the customers who want to rent capacity.
Second, the chips by themselves are probably not all that useful. A lot of the benefit is coming from the silicon/system/software co-design. (E.g. the TPUv4 papers spent as much attention on the optical interconnect as the chips). Selling just chips or accelerator cards wouldn't do much good to any customers. Nor can they just trust that systems integrators could buy the cards and build good systems to house them in. They need to sell and support massive large scale custom systems to third parties. That's not a core competency for any of them, it'll take years to build up that org if you start now. And it means they need to ship the software to the customers, it can't continue being the secret sauce any more.
Nvidia on the other hand has been building up an ecosystem and organization for exactly this for the last decade.