Microsoft sends a new kind of AI processor into the cloud – Ars Technica

Graphcore, founded in Bristol, UK, in 2016, has attracted considerable attention among AI researchers—and several hundred million dollars in investment—on the promise that its chips will accelerate the computations required to make AI work. Until now it has not made the chips publicly available or shown the results of trials involving early testers.

Microsoft, which put its own money into Graphcore last December as part of a $200 million funding round, is keen to find hardware that will make its cloud services more attractive to the growing number of customers for AI applications.

Unlike most chips used for AI, Graphcore’s processors were designed from scratch to support the calculations that help machines to recognize faces, understand speech, parse language, drive cars, and train robots. Graphcore expects it will appeal to companies running business-critical operations on AI, such as self-driving-car startups, trading firms, and operations that process large quantities of video and audio. Those working on next-generation AI algorithms may also be keen to explore the platform’s advantages.

Microsoft and Graphcore today published benchmarks that suggest the chip matches or exceeds the performance of the top AI chips from Nvidia and Google using algorithms written for those rival platforms. Code written specifically for Graphcore’s hardware may be even more efficient.