Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens Xiao Zhan cut, Mr. Aviation, OC_Formula clue delivery! According to news in the morning of May 5, Beijing time, according to reports, people familiar with the matter revealed that Microsoft is working with AMD to jointly develop artificial intelligence processors. This is part of Microsoft's multi-pronged strategy to secure the supply of artificial intelligence processor chips.

The two companies are working together to explore alternatives to Nvidia's GPU chip, according to people familiar with the matter. At present, Nvidia occupies a dominant position in the artificial intelligence processor chip market. In the cooperation, Microsoft has provided financial support for AMD, while the two sides are working together to develop artificial intelligence processors codenamed Athena and developed by Microsoft.

AMD shares rose more than 6.5 per cent on Thursday and Microsoft shares rose about 1 per cent on the news. Both companies declined to comment on the news. Nvidia shares fell 1.9%.

Recently, ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots have attracted wide attention, and the demand for artificial intelligence processors in the industry has also expanded. Microsoft is not only one of the most important cloud computing service providers, but also the main driving force of artificial intelligence applications. Microsoft had previously invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and announced that it would integrate the artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT into all its software.

The move also shows that Microsoft's involvement in the chip industry is gradually deepening. Microsoft, led by Rani Borkar Borka, a former Intel executive, has been building a chip division over the past few years and now employs nearly 1000 people. Last month, the media also exposed the details of Microsoft's development of the artificial intelligence chip Athena.

Hundreds of these employees are working on the Athena project, while Microsoft has invested about $2 billion in chip projects, according to a person familiar with the matter. However, this does not mean that Microsoft will part ways with Nvidia. At present, Nvidia's GPU chip is still the main tool for artificial intelligence model training and reasoning, so Microsoft will continue to work closely with Nvidia. However, the entire industry is facing a shortage of artificial intelligence processors, and Microsoft is also looking for ways to get more Nvidia processors.

Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft's own plans to launch a range of artificial intelligence services mean that Microsoft needs far more artificial intelligence computing power than it had expected when it ordered chips and built data centres. After seeing the capabilities of ChatGPT, many companies are interested in integrating this technology into their products or enterprise applications, and Microsoft has used ChatGPT technology to launch new versions of conversational Bing search and artificial intelligence enhanced Office tools.

Microsoft is also updating older products, such as GitHub's code generation tools. All of these artificial intelligence programs run on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, so more artificial intelligence processors are needed. At present, these processors provided by Nvidia are expensive and in short supply.

Artificial intelligence is also a key priority for AMD. "We are very excited about our opportunities in artificial intelligence, which is our highest strategic priority," Su Zifeng, chief executive of AMD, said on an earnings call on Tuesday. "We are in the very early stages of the era of artificial intelligence computing, and the penetration and growth of artificial intelligence is faster than any other technology in recent history."

Su Zifeng also said that AMD has the opportunity to produce some custom chips for its biggest customers for use in artificial intelligence data centers.

In addition to developing chips for servers and Surface computers, Borka's team at Microsoft is also giving priority to the Athena project. The team is developing a GPU chip that can be used for training and reasoning of artificial intelligence models. The chip is already being tested internally and could be widely used as soon as next year, a person familiar with the matter said.

However, people familiar with the matter also said that even if the project goes ahead according to schedule, the first version is only a starting point. It takes years to design and produce a powerful chip, and Nvidia has a big lead. Currently, Nvidia is the chip supplier of choice for many suppliers of generative artificial intelligence tools, including Amazon AWS and Google Cloud, and Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, has also hoarded thousands of Nvidia processors for his AI business.

Developing alternatives to Nvidia chips will be a challenging task. Nvidia currently provides a complete set of hardware and software around these chips, including chips, programming languages, network equipment and servers, so that customers can quickly build their own capabilities.

This is also one of the reasons why Nvidia is currently in a leading position. In addition, Microsoft is not the only company trying to develop its own artificial intelligence processors. Amazon acquired Annapurna Labs in 2016 and has since developed two artificial intelligence processors. Google also has its own artificial intelligence training chip.

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