Microsoft has listed an opening for a silicon program manager and ‘an engineer for software/hardware co-design and optimization for AI acceleration.’ The job postings clearly suggest that Microsoft is seriously at improving its AI chips that are used in Azure servers.
The company is allocating a big budget to have a full-featured cloud platform. Microsoft is facing stiff competition cloud computing leader in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and even Google. Specialized processors are the only way Microsoft can sustain in this competitive market situation.
Google is currently using the third generation of its artificial intelligence chip. At first, the idea was to promote the custom chip for AI in the cloud. Google is now on the third iteration of its tensor processing unit (TPU), which is an alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing unit (GPU).
TPUs and GPUs are used for training neural networks. These networks and algorithms can analyze a large amount of data such as photos, and even learn to recognize patterns. They can predict by helping computers recognize different people or pick up on the presence of certain objects.
Microsoft is focused on advancements of AI to power its existing technologies. In an email memo to employees in March, the company’s CEO Satya Nadella mentioned AI as many as 18 times. The public cloud is just one of the businesses that are driving growth for Microsoft.
The company has decent experience in semiconductors. Microsoft has taken active steps to supercharge AI computing in its cloud with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips. Microsoft has launched a project called ‘Brainwave’. The new jobs are not part of FPGA. They are rather related to the work that company does in designing its own cloud hardware through an initiative called ‘Project Olympus’.