4 ms·

> The final piece of Google’s strategy today came in the form of a subtle, and very vague, announcement from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on stage in a brief appeara

> The final piece of Google’s strategy today came in the form of a subtle, and very vague, announcement from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on stage in a brief appearance of only a few minutes. Huang announced that Google and Nvidia had been collaborating with a new language model development framework, PaxML, built on top of Google’s cutting-edge machine learning framework JAX and its Accelerated Linear Algebra framework (or XLA). My only thought is, I wonder how well the nvidia/google partnership will do against Azure/Intel (I believe Azure invested heavily in FPGA's for their ML use cases).

ipsum2 3y ago
Azure doesn't use FPGA for ML, they use Nvidia like everyone else. Azure used FPGAs a few years ago for network switches though.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  Ah, I see, looks like that might have been a few years ago, when I last worked in that space.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Does Microsft use Gaudi 2 or Ponte Vecchio much? If Azure offers them, I never hear about projects using them out in the wild. And Microsoft is seemingly shooting for their own AI hardware: https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/07/12/microsofts-chiplet-cloud-to-bring-the-cost-of-llms-way-down/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/07/12/microsofts-chiplet-c...
choppaface 3y ago
Wow, XLA has historically been absolute crap outside of TPUs and even for TPUs the error messages are incredibly poor. If nvidia actually wants to support XLA now perhaps that means the TPU 5 is the last TPU, and/or future TPUs might be targeted at just inference and efficiency (like TPU 5) and then nvidia owns the training game. After all if you compare Nvidia’s success with H100 sales versus GCloud TPU sales, it would be easy for Sundar to say “if you can’t beat em join em” and just maintain TPU team for inference which is more closely tied to wall street margins.

ipsum2 3y ago

Azure doesn't use FPGA for ML, they use Nvidia like everyone else. Azure used FPGAs a few years ago for network switches though.

JohnMakin 3y ago
Ah, I see, looks like that might have been a few years ago, when I last worked in that space.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Does Microsft use Gaudi 2 or Ponte Vecchio much? If Azure offers them, I never hear about projects using them out in the wild. And Microsoft is seemingly shooting for their own AI hardware: https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/07/12/microsofts-chiplet-cloud-to-bring-the-cost-of-llms-way-down/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/07/12/microsofts-chiplet-c...

choppaface 3y ago

Wow, XLA has historically been absolute crap outside of TPUs and even for TPUs the error messages are incredibly poor. If nvidia actually wants to support XLA now perhaps that means the TPU 5 is the last TPU, and/or future TPUs might be targeted at just inference and efficiency (like TPU 5) and then nvidia owns the training game. After all if you compare Nvidia’s success with H100 sales versus GCloud TPU sales, it would be easy for Sundar to say “if you can’t beat em join em” and just maintain TPU team for inference which is more closely tied to wall street margins.