Engineering optimization is not limited to ever higher number of transistors in chips resulting in Moore's law of doubling every 18-24 months. Alternative architectures are also used now.
This is a significant opportunity for businesses to leverage.
It is also a classic "numbers game", where huge sales are driving specialized optimization.
The moonshot that succeeded: How Bing and Azure are using an AI supercomputer in the cloud - Next at Microsoft
"FPGA can be reprogrammed at a moment’s notice to respond to new advances in artificial intelligence or meet another type of unexpected need in a datacenter."
Programmable chips turning Azure into a supercomputing powerhouse | Ars Technica
Microsoft's Internet Business Gets a New Kind of Processor | WIRED
Microsoft's Love For FPGA Accelerators May Be Contagious
"Intel’s $16.7B acquisition of FPGA leader Altera now appears to have been prescient; at the time of the acquisition they predicted that 30% of servers would require FPGA acceleration by 2020."
Developer Preview – EC2 Instances (F1) with Programmable Hardware | AWS Blog
"Field Programmable Gate Array, or FPGA. In contrast to a purpose-built chip which is designed with a single function in mind and then hard-wired to implement it, an FPGA is more flexible. It can be programmed in the field, after it has been plugged in to a socket on a PC board."
"Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom ASIC we built specifically for machine learning — and tailored for TensorFlow. We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law)."
Microsoft's Internet Business Gets a New Kind of Processor | WIRED
Microsoft's Love For FPGA Accelerators May Be Contagious
"Intel’s $16.7B acquisition of FPGA leader Altera now appears to have been prescient; at the time of the acquisition they predicted that 30% of servers would require FPGA acceleration by 2020."
Developer Preview – EC2 Instances (F1) with Programmable Hardware | AWS Blog
"Field Programmable Gate Array, or FPGA. In contrast to a purpose-built chip which is designed with a single function in mind and then hard-wired to implement it, an FPGA is more flexible. It can be programmed in the field, after it has been plugged in to a socket on a PC board."
Applications that scale using GPU Compute (presentation from AzureCon)
How the SoC is Displacing the CPU – Medium
"This shift from mostly performance-centric chips to mostly power-constrained chips and the focus on lowering cost and increasing system-level integration has disrupted the traditional semiconductor landscape within just a decade and continues to reshape the industry today."
"Mobile SoCs are now very competitive to standalone CPUs. They offer matched/better compute performance, matched/better graphics within a lower power envelope and a 10X lower price-point. In addition, a single chip SoC solution is far better suited to a mobile formfactor than a multi-chip CPU solution (Source: Intel/Chipworks)"
Getting started with FPGAs - O'Reilly Media
Ryan Cousins on field programmable gate arrays - O'Reilly Media
ARM + integrated FPGA = much simpler robotic and IoT solutions
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