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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

#171

Post by tester756 »

monlockandkey wrote: post #55
jimmaswell wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mobile, desktop, laptop, edge, server. These are the domains of compute. 4 out of the 5 domains value power efficiency. Laptop that were once x86 are now coming round to Arm because it really does make a better product i.e battery life and thermals. For the server, savings in energy and cost of chip manufacturing, datacentres and users both benefit.

>are now coming round to Arm because it really does make a better product i.e battery life and thermals.

ISA doesn't imply performance characteristics.

It's like saying that programming language (syntax) has performance implication.

No, it doesn't. Everything is up to the compiler, runtime and standard library.

Of course there may be some feature that make compiler's life easier, but still things are way, way more complicated than "just take ARM ISA and you'll be king"

https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...

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

#172

Post by mr_toad »

minedwiz wrote: post #9

Looking over another story on this at https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-unveils-first-ai-chi... , Cobalt seems to be a general purpose ARM CPU.

It doesn’t get as much attention but it’s the one that the average HN’er is much more likely to end up using.

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

#173

Post by mr_toad »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #67
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.

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.

I think in Intel’s case it was both the cost and the power consumption/heat that led to cloud vendors and Apple looking for alternatives.

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

#174

Post by UncleOxidant »

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?

Intel Foundry apparently has some room.

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

#175

Post by OoooooooO »

keep_reading wrote: post #166
tester756 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why aren't any other companies entering this space? There are? INTC and Samsung? >falling exclusively under PROC control It wouldnt fall under PROC control. It would be destroyed.

The USA would certainly bomb it if they had to

TSMC fabs have bombs build in to destroy everything if PROC invades I've read.

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

#176

Post by collegeburner »

sgillen wrote: post #93
adrian_b wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That article shows that it takes about 50x as long to train gpt-3 with intel's offering vs Nvidia. At least in the current environment, if you are training llms I think almost no amount of cost savings can justify that.

huggingface supports multi-node training?? https://huggingface.co/docs/optimum/habana/usage_guides/mult...

am i missing something here? just like you'd want to scale an h100 cluster out beyond one box of 8, you'd do the same for gaudi2?

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

#178

Post by cplusplusfellow »

scarface_74 wrote: post #91
kyboren wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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.

Raising alarm bells because Microsoft is actually dealing with multiple companies? Would it be better for competition if Microsoft only used one supplier?

I would certainly want to spread my risk around to several other large companies.

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

#179

Post by localhost »

tambre wrote: post #107
scarface_74 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The latest Stratechery interview had Pat Gelsinger on it and he was talking about how Intel is happy to package up TSMC dies in their foundries. Relevant quote:

> So it really brings together many of the things that Intel is doing as an IDM, now bringing it together in a heterogeneous environment where we’re taking TSMC dies. We’re going to be using other foundries in the industry, we’re standardizing that with UCIe. So I really see ourself as the front end of this multi-chip chiplet world doing so in the Intel way, standardizing it for the industry’s participation with UCIE, and then just winning a better technology.

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

#180

Post by ksec »

StevePerkins wrote: post #146
scarface_74 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It blows my mind that not only are Apple, Nvidia, and all other enormous "chip makers" fabless... but there's ONE single company actually making the majority of all their chips. Why aren't any other companies entering this space? TSMC's growth and profits are immense, it's not like the market couldn't bear more competitors. Also, the current situation is geopolitical insanity. It feels like China and the U.S. are on…

>it's not like the market couldn't bear more competitors.

The market could only bear if they are willing to pay a lot more in the name of diversification. Otherwise most would simply have trouble keeping up.

We really need some basic FAQ on HN for hardware technology related topic.

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