According to Doug Burger, the tech world is advancing and will soon move into a new orbit. The future will require the major Internet giant companies to carry out the products and services that will cope up with the changing market for their own good. This process will be complicated and very much different than the current operations. In order to prepare for the future, the companies need to build (in fact already are building) an entirely new architecture to run all these processes alongside. They will need to create the new software to drive all these services along with the hardware that will include the servers and the complete network running gears.
Ballmer told Burger that Google and Amazon were already working on these chips. However, Burger believed that these companies could not provide what Microsoft needed to run its own services.
Now in 2016
The programmable chips that Burger believed in, which could transform the world are now here. The field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are ready to be introduced. FPGAs are already underpinning for Bing. If you are thinking that Bing is trying to catch up with Google using these FPGAs, then this is not the case. All the Internet giants of the world are now replacing their central processing units with the silicon-based chips that can work faster and are also able to keep pace with the rapid modifications in the AI.
In the coming weeks, these FPGAs will be driving the new search algorithms that have been based on the neural networks, modeled on the structure of the human brain. These are based on artificial intelligence and can execute The AI much faster than the ordinary chips. They can perform the tasks that a typical chip performs in four seconds in only 23 milliseconds. The FPGAs are also driving Azure which is the company’s cloud computing service. The FPGAs will soon be a part of the server of the Microsoft. This means soon millions of machines around the globe will be using the FPGAs.
Burger said that FPGAs will grant tremendous capacity and enormous flexibility. These will now be the standard architecture of Microsoft. Microsoft is now spending five to six billion dollars on the hardware needed to run the entire online empire of the firm. This work being done on the chips is no longer a part of the research, but it has now become a need and priority of the company.
