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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

#71

Post by echelon »

WanderPanda wrote: post #66
echelon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

They can be losing money, but gaining in market share and moat.

Almost nobody in this game cares about profit right now.

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

#72

Post by adrian_b »

dragontamer wrote: post #37
tmikaeld wrote: post #18

Another AI chip made by TSMC, they make all of them?

That's like complaining that all books are made by Penguin Press or something, ignoring the effort individual authors make. 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…

Microsoft claims that Cobalt has a much lower power consumption than any other Arm CPUs that they have used.

Presumably this means that Cobalt has a much lower power consumption than the current Ampere CPUs used by Azure.

Most of the power consumption reduction for a given performance may have come from using a more recent TSMC process, together with a more recent Arm Neoverse core, but perhaps there might be also some other innovation in the MS design.

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

#73

Post by vb-8448 »

xnx wrote: post #65

Chip manufacturers (including Nvidia) really missed where the market was going if customers like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. feel the need to make their own chips.

My guess is that it's more about the wish of cloud vendors to control everything from the hw to sw: it's called vertical integration, and it's common in a lot of businesses.

It makes a lot of sense from the point of view of cloud giants.

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

#74

Post by beachy »

xnx wrote: post #65

Chip manufacturers (including Nvidia) really missed where the market was going if customers like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. feel the need to make their own chips.

Or cloud vendors have decided that at their scale owning their own chips represents a valuable differentiation opportunity, and they don't think of them as commodities.

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

#75

Post by User3456335 »

xnx wrote: post #65

Chip manufacturers (including Nvidia) really missed where the market was going if customers like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. feel the need to make their own chips.

The demand for chips has increased so much that it's profitable for these customers to start producing their own chips. This doesn't mean Nvidia's chips are bad or that they missed anything.

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

#76

Post by dragontamer »

xnx wrote: post #65

Chip manufacturers (including Nvidia) really missed where the market was going if customers like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. feel the need to make their own chips.

Alternatively: ARM has just made Neoverse designs that easy to use that no one feels like going through another middleman anymore.

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

#80

Post by hulitu »

pseudosavant wrote: post #5

Not a lot of information about the chips yet. About 100B transistors in the AI chip. For comparison, an RTX 4090 has 76B, and an H100 has about 80B. So the Maia chip is pretty massive.

This is like performance review based on written line of code.
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