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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

#261

Post by abstractcontrol »

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..…

> 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.

Can you order any of these devices online as a regular person? Anybody can order a $300 Nvidia GPU and program it. This is the reason why deep learning originated on the GPUs. Forget those other AI accelerators, even if you bought something like a consumer grade AMD GPU, you couldn't program it because it's restricted. The reason why Nvidia's competitors are struggling is because their hardware is either too expensive or hard to buy.

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

#262

Post by sofixa »

spiralpolitik wrote: post #162
bluedino wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't anyone enter? It takes billions and billions of dollars, tons of knowledge and if you get it wrong...even Intel screwed it up, and they are one of the only companies would could even try to do it.

Right now Intel is hamstrung because there is no separation between the fab and design sides. Nobody is going to trust Intel to fab their latest and greatest while the two sides are joined at the hip. The sooner Intel spins out the fab side into its own entity the better positioned it will be to pick up the business that TSMC doesn't have capacity for.

But the whole problem at Intel is that they're not at the level of TSMC, they're years and generations behind. Splitting them up won't just magically make the fab business be better, and without the profit margins of the sale of processors it's unlikely they'll have the resources to invest to get them to be good. Case in point: AMD are doing very well after spinning off their fabs, but their fabs are not doing very well (relatively of course - they're just stuck to where they split and haven't had meaningful advances; but they're still a profitable business because those older chips are needed too).

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

#263

Post by AdamN »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #114

I am a little confused on all this. I thought conventional wisdom was that creating "super good/ top performant " computer processors was hard, and unless you could produce them at scale prohibitable expensive. Is this done as a bridge until/if Nvidia is able to deliver their processors fast enough? I would think that competitors to Nvidea would have serious competitors on the market already if competing can be done…

Second largest cloud on the planet isn't enough scale?

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

#265

Post by aleph_minus_one »

tedunangst wrote: post #227
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Global foundations I believe isn’t making the investment past 16nm. GlobalFoundries' Fab 1 can do 1 nm, and its Fab 8 is capable of doing 14 nm: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GlobalFoundries&o...

1 nm is very impressive.

I meant 12 nm. Sorry for the typo. :-(

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

#266

Post by nradov »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #217
nradov wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would China do that exactly? None of their bombers have sufficient range.

They have intercontinental ballistic missiles. If needed, they can be retrofitted with non-nuclear payload.

The Chinese aren't stupid enough to do that. Any launch of ICBMs at a NATO country would be interpreted as a possible nuclear attack and draw an immediate US counterforce strike.

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

#267

Post by steve1977 »

bee_rider wrote: post #137
mdaniel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don’t really know what an active directory is, but I assume that the default type of directory is a passive one, in that it just holds files or subdirectory (it doesn’t act). An active directory sounds like a directory that is going to play tricks on me. Entra ID sounds like a type of ID. I’m not sure how something could legitimately have each of these names. I assume the functionality changed pretty dramatically o…

That’s kind of a nice take actually. For people like me who did Windows systems engineering at the beginning of the millennium, Active Directory is a very household name. But there’s not much actual meaning behind it. Everything Microsoft was active in that era - Active Directory, Active Desktop, ActiveX, Active Server Pages (lives on as ASP.NET) and probably some more I forgot.

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

#268

Post by monlockandkey »

tester756 wrote: post #171
monlockandkey wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

It's more the fact that power efficiency is something Arm values quite lot in their philosophy since their products are used in mobile and edge devices.

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

#269

Post by bee_rider »

steve1977 wrote: post #267
bee_rider wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really know what an active directory is, but I assume that the default type of directory is a passive one, in that it just holds files or subdirectory (it doesn’t act). An active directory sounds like a directory that is going to play tricks on me. Entra ID sounds like a type of ID. I’m not sure how something could legitimately have each of these names. I assume the functionality changed pretty dramatically o…

That’s kind of a nice take actually. For people like me who did Windows systems engineering at the beginning of the millennium, Active Directory is a very household name. But there’s not much actual meaning behind it. Everything Microsoft was active in that era - Active Directory, Active Desktop, ActiveX, Active Server Pages (lives on as ASP.NET) and probably some more I forgot.

I should admit that I was somewhat lying, I’ve encountered Active Directory before and know it is something vaguely identity/login related.

I was pretty confused the first time I encountered it, though. Could tell from context that it had something to do with accounts, but thought maybe it could be for syncing a user’s home directory or something!

It actually isn’t a terrible name, in isolation, since a directory (like, the non-digital version) was for keeping identities. But “directory” in tech has a pretty strong association with file systems.

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

#270

Post by c0pium »

pseudosavant wrote: post #152
hulitu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like performance review based on written line of code.

In a way, it is the opposite. Code is what you execute. The transistors are the engines that do the execution. They are going to expect a chip they designed with 105B transistors to perform (speed/efficiency/whatever) in the same ballpark as a high=end GPU for their AI workloads. It is like knowing the kind of engine a car has. Not all V8 gas engines produce the same power, but knowing that it is a V8 instead of an i…

> It is like knowing the kind of engine a car has.

In a way you’re right, neither tells you anything about performance.

An sf90 has a v8. So does an 83 mustang, and it even has 25% higher displacement! So clearly the 2023 Ferrari is basically a fastback mustang…

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