Subj : Microsoft is working on an AI chip for ChatGPT as it emulates App
To   : All
From : TechnologyDaily
Date : Tue Apr 18 2023 17:15:03

Microsoft is working on an AI chip for ChatGPT as it emulates Apples perfect 
plan

Date:
Tue, 18 Apr 2023 15:50:20 +0000

Description:
If theres one thing that Apple got spot on, its the quasi obsessive approach 
to the stack.

FULL STORY
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Microsoft wants to launch an AI chip as it looks to position itself as the 
Apple of AI, offering a vertically integrated solution for scale-out 
artificial intelligence. According to the Information , Microsoft has been 
working on the chip, codenamed Athena, since 2019 and engineering samples are 
already available to some Microsoft and OpenAI employees. 2019 was the year 
when the former invested $1 billion in the latter; so theres a likely link 
between the plan for the chip and this first investment. 

Other US based companies (Amazon, Google, Facebook) and non-US entities 
(Tencent, Alibaba) have launched their own custom-built chips for AI with the 
aim to get a hardware solution that performs better than what is commercially 
available off the shelf. These processors are essential for inference and 
large-language model (LLM)training and right now, Nvidia corners the market 
with the A100 and the H100 . 

In doing so, they are mimicking Apples uber-successful vertically integrated, 
hardware-and-software stack, thats deployed across billions of devices 
worldwide. Microsoft unsuccessfully attempted to follow Apples footsteps in 
the consumer market with the ill-fated Windows RT on Arm almost a decade ago 
but this time around, Microsoft seems to be more in control, and most 
importantly, not a laggard. Saving billions 

Microsoft has, to put it mildly, embraced artificial intelligence at scale 
with enthusiasm. It has baked ChatGPT across all its flagship products and 
services ( Bing , Microsoft 365 , Github ) and its only a matter of time 
before it gets deployed across its entire Azure stack. The biggest obstacle 
to the rollout is the hardware cost which, according to experts, could reach 
tens of billions of dollars per year. Microsoft is already collaborating with 
Nvidia to build a next-generation supercomputer and it is likely that the 
worlds largest software company may leverage Athena to get better rates or 
priority from Nvidia in the future. 

Other than the fact that about 300 people are working on Athena at Microsoft, 
the Information also claims that the roadmap for the chip includes multiple 
generations and the first generation will be fabbed using TSMCs 5nm 
manufacturing process. Ex-Apple CPU architect, Mike Filippo , is likely to 
have a hand in that project although his expertise lies more with CPU . 

To some extent, Project Athena is a follow up to Project Brainwave, the 
FPGA-powered system that Microsoft has been using since 2017 when it started 
dabbling with AI. Back then, Intel Stratix 10 FPGA (Field Programmable Gate 
Array) cards were used to produce what now looks like the first draft of 
Microsoft AI strategy. Should Microsoft follow Googles step with a TPU-like 
product, we can expect a lot of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a relatively low 
TDP and a laser-focus on peak FLOPs per dollar. Also check out our list of 
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Link to news story:
https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-is-working-on-an-ai-chip-for-chat-gpt
-as-it-emulates-apples-perfect-plan


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