Weird use of "homemade"! I guess they mean "in-house"?
Just like how mama used to make 'em!
It's a delightful coincidence of history that the "What's Jensen been cooking" pandemic gag happened on the generation that would wake up the AIs.
Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
111–120 of 137 posts
Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
#112I don't like this trend where all the big tech companies are bringing hardware in-house, because it makes it unavailable to everyone else. I'd rather not have it be the case that everyone who isn't big tech either pays the Nvidia tax or deals with comparatively worse hardware, while each big tech has their own. If these big tech companies also sold their in-house chips, then that would address this problem. I like what Ampere is doing in this space.
Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
#113Url changed from https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/02/microsoft_maia_dc/, which points to this.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
#114"Microsoft Silicon", coming up. Is it practical for them to buy an existing chip maker? Or would they just go home-grown? - As of today, Nvidia's market cap is a whopping 4.51 trillion USD compared to Microsoft's 3.85 trillion USD, so that might not work. - AMD's market cap is 266.49 billion USD, which is more in reach.
Intel is almost a bargain at $175 billion
Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first revisions were stuff made by qualcomm right? I don't think we have much data on how much customizations they make and where they their IP from, but given how much of the Tensor cores comes from Samsung I think it's safe to say to assume that there is a decent amount coming from some of the big vendors.
To be fair that’s a pretty good approach if you look at Apple’s progression from assembled IPs in the first iPhone CPU to the A and M series.
Apple generally tries to erase info about acquisitions from their official company story, they want it to look like internal Apple innovation.
When it comes to CPUs they bought P.A. Semi back in 2008 and got a lot of smart people with decades of relevant experience that were doing cutting-edge stuff at the time.
This was immensely important to be able to deliver current Apple CPUs.
Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
#116Made where? Isn’t foundry capacity the limiting factor on chips for AI right now?
By cutting the middle man out, MS could pay TSMC more than nvidia per wafer and still save money.
They can even pay Broadcom to be a lower-level middle man instead. Despite the BRCM tax, it'll still be way cheaper than going to Nvidia.
Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
#117Not suprising that the hyperscalers will make this decision for inference and maybe even a large chunk of training. I wonder if it will spur nvidia to work on an inference only accelerator.
> I wonder if it will spur nvidia to work on an inference only accelerator. Arguably that's a GPU? Other than (currently) exotic ways to run LLMs like photonics or giant SRAM tiles there isn't a device that's better at inference than GPUs and they have the benefit that they can be used for training as well. You need the same amount of memory and the same ability to do math as fast as possible whether its inference or…
Isn't Etched's Soho ASIC claimed to be much better than a GPU?
Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
#118I do too.
Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
#119I don't like this trend where all the big tech companies are bringing hardware in-house, because it makes it unavailable to everyone else. I'd rather not have it be the case that everyone who isn't big tech either pays the Nvidia tax or deals with comparatively worse hardware, while each big tech has their own. If these big tech companies also sold their in-house chips, then that would address this problem. I like wh…
Another way to look at it would be that if all the big players stop buying up all the GPUs, prices will come back down for regular consumers, making it available for everyone else.
Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips
#120The big data center owners will want to build their own hardware, that is a no brainer for them.