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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

#101

Post by solardev »

stanac wrote: post #35
aiman3 wrote: post #15

NVIDIA should start offer AI cloud, buy DigitalOcean, counterattack microsoft, google, amazon, since they are attacking NVIDIA's territory.

They already have gaming cloud, wouldn't be unthinkable to offer gpgpu cloud.

It's a hell of a cloud too. Geforce Now performs several times better than Microsoft's crappy offering, xCloud (or whatever it's called now).

Nvidia made some really amazing strides in the past few years, taking over cloud gaming where Onlive and Stadia utterly failed, making DLSS, etc.

I just hope they don't abandon us gamers for their AI stuff :( Probably the entire gaming market is way smaller than the potential AI market, just hopefully not too small to matter.

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

#102

Post by swozey »

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 converted my corp apps to ARM (Fargate Graviton) last year and our AWS bill plummeted and the time to fully initialize a container did so as well.

I'd never tell the higher ups this but it was pretty easy, too. I'll let them bask in my glory of saving the company $60k/month.

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

#103

Post by solardev »

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…

It's not a matter of giving due credit, but supply constraints. Books aren't limited by the availability of printing presses, are they? (maybe they are and I just didn't know?)

But if TSMC is the only company that can do this, they're a bottleneck for the entire world. Not to mention a strategic and geopolitical risk for the West.

It's be nice if some domestic companies invested in fabs again...

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

#104

Post by latchkey »

solardev wrote: post #98
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capital costs are enormous, not even counting the CUDA moat. It takes years to start producing a big AI processor. 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..…

Is there not a distributed computing potential here like there was for crypto mining? Some sort of seti@home/boinc like setup where home users can donate or sell compute time?

The capex/opex is different for ML/AI than it was for crypto mining. Totally different hardware profiles.

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

#105

Post by fragmede »

solardev wrote: post #98
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capital costs are enormous, not even counting the CUDA moat. It takes years to start producing a big AI processor. 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..…

Is there not a distributed computing potential here like there was for crypto mining? Some sort of seti@home/boinc like setup where home users can donate or sell compute time?

you can setup a computer and sell time on it on a couple of saas platforms, but only for inference. for training, the slowness of the interconnect between nodes become a bottleneck.

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

#106

Post by solardev »

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.

Nvidia rode a gaming high from RTX straight into a crypto high and then straight into the AI high. Their products just print money right now and nobody else is close yet. They can always lower prices later, but for now they're getting filthy rich...

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

#107

Post by tambre »

scarface_74 wrote: post #84
jedberg wrote: post #3

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.

If they “can’t make the chips fast enough” being TSMC’s second highest volume customer behind Apple and probably second in priority, what chance does Microsoft have getting enough of TSMCs capacity?

They're more constrained by advanced packaging (CoWoS) capacity rather than the manufacturing of the silicon.

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

#108

Post by solardev »

fragmede wrote: post #105
solardev wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there not a distributed computing potential here like there was for crypto mining? Some sort of seti@home/boinc like setup where home users can donate or sell compute time?

you can setup a computer and sell time on it on a couple of saas platforms, but only for inference. for training, the slowness of the interconnect between nodes become a bottleneck.

I see, thanks for the explanation!

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

#109

Post by mdaniel »

ShamelessC wrote: post #96
belval wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why? Inferentia => inference, trainium => training. Funny, that's precisely why I think the names are bad. It's like if Google had chosen "Search-ola" as their name. Way too on the nose and/or lazy. Having said that, I don't really care all that much and I imagine that may have been the spirit of those who chose the names.

heh, as someone who has to deal with this nonsense all day https://aws.amazon.com/products/> I would for sure welcome some straightforward naming. $(echo "AWS Fargate" | sed s/Fargate/ServerlessContainerium/)

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

#110

Post by mdaniel »

bonton89 wrote: post #46
ShamelessC wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes those names are horrible.

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

I'm still so bitter about this nonsense https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/identity-a...

> Azure Active Directory is now Microsoft Entra ID

ok, geez, thanks

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