{"id":56890,"date":"2016-09-27T09:22:07","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T13:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/?p=56890"},"modified":"2016-09-27T09:22:07","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T13:22:07","slug":"microsoft-bets-its-future-on-a-reprogrammable-computer-chip-wired-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/2016\/09\/27\/microsoft-bets-its-future-on-a-reprogrammable-computer-chip-wired-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip [wired.com]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/2016\/09\/microsoft-bets-future-chip-reprogram-fly\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip<\/strong> <\/a>&#8212; from wired.com<\/p>\n<p>Excerpt:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Burger, a computer chip researcher who had joined the company four years earlier, was pitching a new idea to the execs. He called it <strong>Project Catapult.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">The tech world, Burger explained, was moving into a new orbit. In the future, a few giant Internet companies would operate a few giant Internet services so complex and so different from what came before that these companies would have to build a whole new architecture to run them. They would create not just the software driving these services, but the hardware, including servers and networking gear. Project Catapult would equip all of Microsoft\u2019s servers\u2014millions of them\u2014with specialized chips that the company could reprogram for particular tasks.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nToday, the programmable chips that Burger and Lu believed would transform the world\u2014called field programmable gate arrays\u2014are here. FPGAs already underpin Bing, and in the coming weeks, they will drive new search algorithms based on deep neural networks\u2014artificial intelligence modeled on the structure of the human brain\u2014executing this AI several orders of magnitude faster than ordinary chips could. As in, 23 milliseconds instead of four seconds of nothing on your screen. FPGAs also drive Azure, the company\u2019s cloud computing service. And in the coming years, almost every new Microsoft server will include an FPGA. That\u2019s millions of machines across the globe. \u201cThis gives us massive capacity and enormous flexibility, and the economics work,\u201d Burger says. \u201cThis is now Microsoft\u2019s standard, worldwide architecture.\u201d<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nIt\u2019s a typical tangle of tech acronyms. CPUs. GPUs. TPUs. FPGAs. But it\u2019s the subtext that matters. With cloud computing, companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon are driving so much of the world\u2019s technology that those alternative chips will drive the wider universe of apps and online services. Lee says that Project Catapult will allow Microsoft to continue expanding the powers of its global supercomputer until the year 2030. After that, he says, the company can move toward quantum computing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip &#8212; from wired.com Excerpt: Burger, a computer chip researcher who had joined the company four years earlier, was pitching a new idea to the execs. He called it Project Catapult. The tech world, Burger explained, was moving into a new orbit. In the future, a few [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[113,356,208,45,180,482,55,216,309,367],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-21st-century","category-artificial-intelligence-agents-llms-and-related","category-cloud-based-computing-apps","category-computer-science","category-innovation","category-intelligent-systems","category-internet","category-microsoft","category-platforms","category-vendors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56892,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56890\/revisions\/56892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danielschristian.com\/learning-ecosystems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}