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> At Microsoft, we have everything from silicon to compilers to the operating system In what way does Microsoft "have silicon"? They don't own a fab, FAFAIK. D
by tremon 4y ago
> At Microsoft, we have everything from silicon to compilers to the operating system
In what way does Microsoft "have silicon"? They don't own a fab, FAFAIK. Do they design their own processors like Amazon does, or is this simply referring to the amount of datacenters Microsoft is operating for their Azure platform?
- LeonTheremin 4y agoXbox and Pluton, at least.
- gigel82 4y agoAlso, technically the SQ* chips (like SQ1 used in Surface X) are also Microsoft chips, though they look more like slightly tweaked / rebranded Qualcomm devices.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoBoth are specs though. AMD does the design according to Microsoft's requirements but you can't really call that silicon design on behalf of Microsoft.
- colinmhayes 4y agoGotta be thinking they’re working on their own graviton given how much aws claims it’s saving them.
- mhio 4y agoI believe the Hololens is custom silicon https://www.anandtech.com/show/14775/hot-chips-31-live-blogs-microsoft-hololens-20-silicon https://www.anandtech.com/show/14775/hot-chips-31-live-blogs...
- yyyyyr 4y agoThey have custom FPGAs in Azure to offload networking and storage from the host CPU. There's an internal team designing and deploying all these, and the eventual goal is to have all this on ASICs for even more efficiency. Though you are right that they'll be subcontracting out the actual fabrication.