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Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

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Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

#121

Post by VirusNewbie »

latchkey wrote: post #71
amelius wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean. Google is a big company. Their TPUs have many users internally.

Very few developers outside of Google have ever written code for a TPU. In a similar way, far fewer have written code for AMD, compared to NVIDIA. If you're going to design a custom chip and deploy it in your data centers, you're also committing to hiring and training developers to build for it. That's a kind of moat, but with private chips. While you solve one problem (getting the compute you want), you create anoth…

>Very few developers outside of Google have ever written code for a TPU.

Anthropic?

Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

#122

Post by hulitu »

improgrammer007 wrote: post #56

For those who don't know Msft is working on https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-maia-for-the-er...

> For those who don't know Msft is working on

We do know: ads, spyware and rounding corners of UI elements.

If their processor work like their software, i really feel pity for people who use it.

Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

#123

Post by hulitu »

jtfrench wrote: post #97

"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.

> "Microsoft Silicon", coming up.

Will they equip the new Microsoft Vacuum Cleaner with it ? /s

Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

#124

Post by j_walter »

floxy wrote: post #114
jtfrench wrote: post #97

"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

They were more of a bargain 3 months ago at $80B.

Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

#125

Post by jlarocco »

Etheryte wrote: post #119
john01dav wrote: post #112

I 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.

But there's a real risk that in the long term all of the "serious" AI hardware research will get done inside a few big companies, essentially shutting out smaller players with a hardware moat.

Unless they start selling the hardware, but in the current AI market nobody would do that because it's their special sauce.

On the other hand, maybe it's no different than any other hardware, and other makers will catch up eventually.

Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

#126

Post by tovej »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #66
floxy wrote: post #52

On a slightly different tangent, is anyone working on analog machine learning ASICs? Sub-threshold CMOS or something? I mean even at the research level? Using a handful of transistor for an analog multiplier. And get all of the crazy fascinating translinear stuff of Barrie Gilbert fame. https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/article... https://www.analog.com/en/resources/analog-dialogue/articles... http…

A bunch of people. Just type these terms into DuckDuckGo: analog neural network hardware physical neural network hardware Put "this paper" after each one to get academic research. Try it with and without that phrase. Also, add "survey" to the next iteration. The papers that pop up will have the internal jargon the researchers use to describe their work. You can further search with it. The "this paper," "survey," and…

Are you aware of dblp.org?

Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

#127

Post by tyre »

jlarocco wrote: post #125
Etheryte wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But there's a real risk that in the long term all of the "serious" AI hardware research will get done inside a few big companies, essentially shutting out smaller players with a hardware moat. Unless they start selling the hardware, but in the current AI market nobody would do that because it's their special sauce. On the other hand, maybe it's no different than any other hardware, and other makers will catch up even…

And some of those people will leave to start their own companies or join competitor chipmakers. Innovation will continue.

Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

#128

Post by foobiekr »

osivertsson wrote: post #115
Moto7451 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PA Semi was kind of an interesting acquisition. The team was definitely very skilled, but there are always gotchas. Before the acquisition happened we were on their receiving end of their dual core PPC and it was not great at all. We had a lot of issues with board bringup, power, and heat. More errata than I've ever seen. We eventually had to went with x86 for the project instead, which was more performant and certainly a lot easier overall at the time.

I had previously encountered some of that team with the SiByte MIPS in an embedded context, I know they were highly skilled, they had tons of pedigree, but PA Semi itself was a strange beast.

Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

#129

Post by foobiekr »

conradev wrote: post #64
rjzzleep wrote: post #42

Earlier 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.

For TPUs I believe it is Broadcom: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/22/google_broadcom_tpus/ Not sure about the mobile SoCs

Broadcom fills the same role for Google TPU that Marvell fills for Trainium @ amazon.

Re: Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

#130

Post by arisAlexis »

jtfrench wrote: post #97

"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.

They could buy with peanut money Cerebras
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