81–90 of 282 posts
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.
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 bet you haven't used any Microsoft product before. /s
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.
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.
It wasn’t that long ago that computer manufacturers would build their own chips.
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.
> 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…
Yet many startups and existing designers anticipated this demand correctly, years in advance, and they are all still kinda struggling. Nvidia is massively supply constrained. AI customers would be buying up MI250s, CS-2s, IPUs, Tenstorrent accelerators, Gaudi 2s and so on en masse if they wanted to... But they are not, and its not going to get any easier once the supply catches up.
Unless there's a big one in stealth mode, I think we are stuck with the hardware companies we have.
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.
For example, for scientific computation and computer-aided design, Fujitsu is the only company that has designed Arm CPUs that can compete with the x86 CPUs, but they do not sell their CPUs on the free market.
For a huge company, the floating-point performance of the CPUs is less important, because they can use datacenter GPUs with even greater throughput, so the existing Arm server CPUs could be good enough even for a supercomputer, as they only have to move the data to and from the GPUs. However the small businesses and the individuals cannot use datacenter GPUs, which have huge prices, so they can use only x86 CPUs and there is not the slightest chance of any alternative that would appear soon.
Another application domain for which no Arm vendor has ever made competitive devices is for cheap personal computers.
Nothing what Apple does matters, because they do not sell computers, they only lend computers that remain under their control and which are much more expensive than their alternatives anyway.
Besides Apple, only Qualcomm, Mediatek and NVIDIA are able to make Arm CPUs with a performance similar to the cheapest of the Intel and AMD CPUs, but all these 3 companies demand for their CPUs prices that are several times higher than the prices of comparable x86 CPUs.
Like for CPUs with high floating-point or big integer performance, there is not the slightest chance for the appearance of any company that would be willing to sell Arm CPUs that are both cheap and fast.
Also for server CPUs, all the companies that have attempted to design Arm-based server CPUs have never designed models suitable for small businesses or individuals, but only models that can be bought only by very big companies.
I would not mind to switch from x86 to Arm, but there is absolutely no perspective for that.
If the x86 CPUs would disappear, that would be a catastrophe for the people who do not want to depend on the mercy of the big companies. That would be a return to the times from before the personal computers, when all computing had to be done remotely, in the computing centers of big companies, which have been renamed now as "clouds".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They are commercializing the silicon, by selling access to it on their clouds. 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 becau…
And TSMCs top customer is not even playing in the cloud space.
> 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 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”
Also the new MX datatypes ( https://www.opencompute.org/blog/amd-arm-intel-meta-microsof... ), from the article: "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 softwa…