
Microsoft Bets on FPGAs for Cloud, ML and AI - JoachimS
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/microsoft-bets-future-chip-reprogram-fly/?mbid=social_twitter
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t0mas88
Next move is on Amazon... Google took the first deep dive with their TPU,
Microsoft is a bit more future ready now using FPGAs. Amazon is currently
mostly offering Nvidia GPUs, of an older generation. So I'm curious when they
will come out with their own custom chip.

All of this is not great for Nvidia, who are betting big on AI to move out of
the gaming market. So if everyone goes cloud and every cloud goes custom
hardware, they will not have much of a market left.

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webmaven
_> Amazon is currently mostly offering Nvidia GPUs, of an older generation. So
I'm curious when they will come out with their own custom chip._

The large web service (and now cloud) vendors already exert a lot of leverage
on hardware vendors (and Amazon more than most) which already often gets them
custom OEM variants of components including CPUs, I wouldn't expect Amazon to
go down a custom hardware path until they have pushed their existing approach
as far as it can go.

 _> if everyone goes cloud and every cloud goes custom hardware, [Nvidia] will
not have much of a market left._

The thing is, the cloud vendors are going to be focusing mostly on cost
effectiveness of the hardware for deployment, balancing power consumption with
speed (to the extent that speed affects revenue, which they already routinely
measure).

So, there are probably many places within the data center where GPGPUs make
much more sense than Custom ASICs or FPGAs when you look at the fully loaded
CapEx and OpEx over the lifetime of the hardware (3D render farms come to mind
as an example), not to mention that demand for ML/AI systems running locally,
outside the data center (in PCs & consoles) for non-gaming purposes will
probably start growing soon.

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rkwasny
I feel big companies are betting on everything, just because of a fear of
missing the opportunity, you need to have: cloud, AI, custom chips, own OS
etc.

