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Microsoft, AMD partner to develop AI processors

Microsoft, AMD partner to develop AI processors
Photo Credit: Credit: Pixabay
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Microsoft is working with chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on building artificial intelligence processors, a report by Bloomberg said. This partnership is reportedly to offer an alternative of Nvidia which currently dominates the market for AI processors. Microsoft will be supporting AMD’s efforts in engineering resources. 

This partnership comes at a time when there is a demand to augment AI processing power, especially after the introduction of generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Microsoft has been building a new chip codenamed Athena, as reported by The Information last month. While it was assumed that Microsoft-AMD partnership was to build Athena, the Microsoft spokesperson denied AMD’s involvement in this particular project.

The company has been reportedly working on this chip since 2019. As per The Information’s report, Athena will use TSMC 5nm process and will gradually create more generations of the chip in future.

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This will allow the company to save overhead from purchasing chips from Nvidia which is the key supplier of AI server chips. Nvidia’s A100 chip is graphical processing unit particularly built for machine learning models that power tools like ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Stable Diffusion. It was first introduced in May 2020. It can perform several calculations simultaneously for training and using neural network models.

Google, which is competing with Microsoft in the generative AI domain, released a blog and a research paper about its fourth-generation tensor processing unit (TPUv4) that was made available for customers on Google Cloud in 2022. The chip, like Nvidia’s A100 is targeted at machine learning tasks. A paper published by researchers at Google and UC Berkley on the architecture and working of TPUv4 claimed that the supercomputer “is 1.2x–1.7x faster and uses 1.3x–1.9x less power than the Nvidia A100”.


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