Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 282 posts

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

#191

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

Flameancer wrote: post #185
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insanely hard. TSMC is so dominant because they have very, very, deep institutional knowledge. Even if you have billions to invest it's not easy to create that, and definitely impossible to do it short term. There's only 3 companies left chasing smaller nodes. Everyone else has given up and are focusing on revenue from high volume parts in older processes.

The only three are Samsung, Intel, and TSMC. Idk why going on with Intel but Samsung should BSs doing better but that institutional knowledge that TSMC has is crazy. They all technically invest in asml that makes the machines. If I had to redo my education I’d get into electrical engineering just for this.

> I’d get into electrical engineering just for this

I get the impression it's mostly physics guys.

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

#193

Post by thoiu2342343 »

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 worse. It's one company in a 'contested' territory. So much so that US military is rumored to have considered the 'samson option' of bombing the TSMC facility were the PLA to occupy the island.

Taiwan (unlike Ukraine) is far too critical to the world economy.

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

#194

Post by lethal-radio »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #191
Flameancer wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only three are Samsung, Intel, and TSMC. Idk why going on with Intel but Samsung should BSs doing better but that institutional knowledge that TSMC has is crazy. They all technically invest in asml that makes the machines. If I had to redo my education I’d get into electrical engineering just for this.

> I’d get into electrical engineering just for this I get the impression it's mostly physics guys.

Everything is physics when you get down to the fundamentals.

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

#195

Post by xutao323 »

Cobalt is based on Arm CSS model, so it's Neoverse series probably N2 (based on 128 core count). AWS Graviton 2/3 is N1/V1, and Nvidia Grace is V2. Ampere Altra is N1 and the new Ampere One is publicly unknown.

Several Chinese companies also develop chips based on N2, like Alibaba T-head and ZTE Sanechips. I worked on software tunings for both of them. It's good to see more and more Arm chips.

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

#196

Post by userbinator »

chongli wrote: post #155
pdq wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the new HaaS business model: Hardware as a Service.

I’m curious to know what everyone thinks of this trend. Do you view it as a good thing, bringing efficiency and economy of scale, competition and so forth? Or do you consider it a bad thing, another salvo in the War on General Purpose Computing [1] so vividly described by Cory Doctorow? I, personally, am interested in retrocomputing, amateur/hobbyist electronics, and hobbyist computing (including semiconductors [2]).…

IMHO definitely a bad thing; and beyond the war on general-purpose computing, it's the "you will own nothing and be happy" war on ownership.

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

#197

Post by userbinator »

tester756 wrote: post #169
magnio wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the current king of single core Geekbench is the M3 chips. Even the base M3 scores as high as the i9-14900K and higher than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, at less than half their TDPs.

>FWIW, the current king of single core Geekbench is the M3 chips Are we reading the same scores? https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/singlecore

Do those scores even make any sense?

The top consists of what appears to be an Intel i3-10100 overclocked past 13GHz(!), a Ryzen 7 5800H at 2.8GHz, and then an i9-14900K at just below 800MHz.

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

#198

Post by lazide »

adrian_b wrote: post #97
sgillen wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That 50X is only if you can afford one thousand NVIDIA H100. There cannot be more than a handful of companies in the entire world that could afford such a huge price (tens of millions of $). In comparison with a still extremely expensive cluster of 64 NVIDIA H100, the difference in speed would reduce to only two to three times, and paying several times less for the entire training becomes very attractive.

You’ve got a really warped sense of scale if you think only a handful of companies couldn’t afford tens of millions of dollars.

That’s complete pocket change for any of the Fortune 500.

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

#199

Post by blackoil »

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…

By internal and external claims, Intel is on track to be competitive with TSMC by 2025. And, Nvidia and other will use the capacity as soon it is available.

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

#200

Post by blackoil »

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

And, If china bombs ASML we'll be back to stone age.
Post reply on HN