Well, any "next-gen, hyperscale AI system" at the level of Microsoft is going to be part hardware, part software, part infrastructure; the scale is simply too l

Well, any "next-gen, hyperscale AI system" at the level of Microsoft is going to be part hardware, part software, part infrastructure; the scale is simply too large these days to short-change any one of these and remain competitive. Microsoft's network and the decoupling of the FPGA from the host machine are major aspects of Brainwave's success for them, but any successful project like this, even with different specific choices -- is going to largely be sustained off "boring" things like a solid networking backbone. Plus there are other concerns at this scale, like power usage, so just thinking of it in terms networking is misleading... Microsoft has had major success with Brainwave and they seem committed to it, but overall the field is advancing pretty rapidly and there will be lots of competitors (not just FPGAs) in this space. And their needs and use cases are unique, so drawing generalized conclusions is a little tough. (As a disclosure, I work on DNNs-on-FPGAs for $WORK, but am speaking generally.)