Field Programmable Gate Arrays

[mike acker]

WIRED article regarding MSFT use of FPGA

Excerpt

Today, the programmable chips that Burger and Lu believed would transform the world—called field programmable gate arrays—are here. FPGAs already underpin Bing, and in the coming weeks, they will drive new search algorithms based on deep neural networks—artificial intelligence modeled on the structure of the human brain—executing 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’s cloud computing service. And in the coming years, almost every new Microsoft server will include an FPGA. That’s millions of machines across the globe. “This gives us massive capacity and enormous flexibility, and the economics work,” Burger says. “This is now Microsoft’s standard, worldwide architecture.”

interesting to ponder how all this fits into their "Cloud Strategy"; could be all the programming is going out the gate and not into the cloud at all

[millpond]

Embedded apps are always going to be faster - just ask the bitcoin miners.

However what is important to the home and small production systems is *versatility* - which by nature implied a certain 'inefficiency' since its like asking a screwdriver to be a mechanics tool, a garden weeder, and a back scratcher.

These things have been around for years, and will probably best be applied to the IoT stuff.

In larger machines where ideally they can be used to reprogram the instruction set and the underlying architecture with AI fully in place, we are looking at some interesting possibilities here. Think Skynet.