The Microsoft chip has MX data types: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37930663
The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
61–70 of 282 posts
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But will these run Linux, run AI stuff the way the Apple Silicon seems to be able to do? 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 m…
Microsoft has taken a couple swings at making ARM laptops (which, we should note, doesn’t appear to be what they are announcing here).
I’d expect a future hypothetical Microsoft ARM laptop to be like a surface-RT; some Windows dropped on a third party ARM chip. Microsoft is a software company, after all. So it is more of a matter of, do they happen to have bought a chip that supports Linux (probably yes, because what hardware manufacturer wants to be dependent on one company for OS support?) and can you get past Secureboot (probably yes, after a couple years at least, when the jailbreak happens).
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#63Damn, 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…
> - Satya brings NVidia CEO Jensen Huang on stage
This should be ringing alarm bells at FTC and DoJ.
You know what's even better than trust busting and breaking up cartels? Preventing the formation of cartels and trusts in the first place.
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#64Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#65Chip manufacturers (including Nvidia) really missed where the market was going if customers like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. feel the need to make their own chips.
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Unless Microsoft is planning to acquire OpenAI fully 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.
I don’t think the margins here are so considerable that we can assume revenue = profit
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#67Chip manufacturers (including Nvidia) really missed where the market was going if customers like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. feel the need to make their own chips.
I think they got the direction right but the price wrong. They are used to dealing with super-computers as the main server clients who aren't big enough to fight back if the prices creep to high.
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#68Chip manufacturers (including Nvidia) really missed where the market was going if customers like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. feel the need to make their own chips.
Microsoft, Amazon, etc. feel the need to make their own chips so that they don't let NVIDIA take all the profits, not because they think NVIDIA is incompetent
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Microsoft absolutely runs their own models on their own hardware, at scale, and they have done so for years just like every other hyperscaler -- Project Brainwave was first publicly talked about as far back as 2018. The generative LLM craze is a recent phenomenon in comparison. They are absolutely going to go all in on putting AI functionality in Bing, in Excel, in Windows, etc etc. To do that, you need hardware.
None of this is really strange. It also wasn't strange when Google announced H100 systems while also pushing TPUs they developed. Microsoft has Jensen on stage because customers of Microsoft Azure demand Nvidia products. Customers of Google Cloud demand Nvidia products. So, they provide them those products, because not providing them loses those customers. It's that simple. Everyone involved in these deals acknowledges this.
Re: The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud
#70It 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.
nVidia still has the monopoly on training. Everyone else is just making chips for inference.
While NVIDIA provides the best absolute performance for training, Intel (i.e. Gaudi) already provides much better training performance per dollar.
The funny thing is that this fact has been shown inadvertently by NVIDIA:
https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-shows-intel-gaudi2-is-4x...