Brief summary: Microsoft is now using FPGAs (flexible hardware that can be 'programmed' to implemebt various chips) as part of its Cloud tech stack. The FPGAs c

Brief summary: Microsoft is now using FPGAs (flexible hardware that can be 'programmed' to implemebt various chips) as part of its Cloud tech stack. The FPGAs can run their algorithms with better speed and energy efficiency than CPUs, but are less flexible (a pain to alter). The article does not explain it very well, I think MS itself lays it out quite clearly: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-catapult/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-cat... Also annoyingly this article does not link to the paper about this, which also explains it better than the article. I recall this one from MS about how they use the FPGAs in Bing; was pretty impressed by it at the time. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-reconfigurable-fabric-for-accelerating-large-scale-datacenter-services/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-recon...