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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

#231

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

Flameancer wrote: post #184
buildbot wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TSMC is solving some of the hardest physics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and other kinds of engineering I don't even know about. It's unlikely anyone catches up to them in terms of lithography ability for a long, long time given how well they've executed 45nm and lower nodes.

More like ASML is solving the physics problems and TSMC is the one with the most capital and experience to run their EUV machines. It’s not that other competitors don’t exist, it’s more like they’ve given up or can’t keep up. Global foundations I believe isn’t making the investment past 16nm. Samsungs latest node doesn’t perform as good as TSMC and intel is being intel.

A fab is far, far, more than ASML's machines. A chip can take around 3 months going through various steps repeatedly.

ASML's machines are very impressive, but they're just one piece of that puzzle. And ASML themselves rely on collaborators like Zeiss.

This idea that it's all just capital and others are reluctant to invest otherwise they could duplicate TSMC simply false.

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

#232

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

OoooooooO wrote: post #175
keep_reading wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You read bullshit.

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

#233

Post by magnio »

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

That page ranks individual test run, so the top ranking are filled with outliers of internal system or crazily overclocked liquid cooled behemoth. When a CPU has appeared in sufficiently many test runs, the aggregate result, which is more representative of the real performance, will appear on https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks.

The i9-14900K and M3 actually haven't appeared in the official chart, but you can search for them as they already have thousands of test runs[0][1]. Both of them score around 3100 in single core, and around 21000 in multicore (for the M3 Max).

[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=i9-149... [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=mac15

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

#234

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

hulitu wrote: post #229
mackid wrote: post #131

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” - Alan Kay

[flagged]

Wow, you sure owned them ...

Could we just not make these kind of comments? They aren't useful.

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

#235

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #86
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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..…

There's also potential IP issues.

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

#236

Post by Aromasin »

nl wrote: post #208
Aromasin wrote: post #139

Note that Microsoft has been using "custom chips" for years; they've just been on FPGAs not ASICs. They've developed IP to accelerate a whole bunch of processes, so it's not like they've suddenly come around to a magic sauce that Amazon and Google have been doing this whole time. It would surprise me if over half of the new chip is just based on RTL from their FPGA design. The only thing that's changed is that they'r…

MS has offered FPGAs for years. AFAIK they aren't generally using them themselves, although I'd be interested to read otherwise.

Project Catapult as other comments have spoken about, and the newly announced Azure Boost has FPGAs on board too.

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

#238

Post by huytersd »

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…

And TSMC uses the ASML fabrication machines made by… one company. Basically two places are responsible for all of those chips. Intel really needs to get back in the game. Hopefully that’s still on the table.

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

#239

Post by pjmlp »

wmf wrote: post #54
machinekob wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This time AMD for sure will fight with NV (its only failed 20 times already copium)

On one hand this is a fair prediction but Triton exists now and it didn't exist last time.

If the software still sucks with what CUDA can do, in graphics tooling, polyglot support and optmized libraries, across at very least Windows and GNU/Linux, than whatever the card is capable of doing isn't much relevant.

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

#240

Post by pjmlp »

pdq wrote: post #141
gary_0 wrote: post #16

> 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".

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

Nah, it is still the same old business only rebranded for new folks, timesharing systems.
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