TECHNOLOGY
“ By taking a systemson-a-chip ( SoC ) approach , data centre computer manufacturers can now optimise performance , cost , and power consumption simultaneously ”
STEPHEN SIMPSON FORMER PRINCIPAL DATA ARCHITECT AT QUANTUM BLACK
SoCs are the new motherboard According to Analytics India Magazine ( AIM ), the majority of cloud providers are turning to customised chips – including Google Cloud , which referred to SoCs as the ‘ new motherboard ’. In 2015 , the company developed TPUs or Tensor Processing Units , AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuits ( ASICs ) designed for neural network machine learning , which became available to third-party use in 2018 . Google also sold smaller versions of the chip .
Google ’ s TPUs have become a powerhouse for a range of services including real-time voice search , photo object recognition , and interactive language translation . According to Amin Vahdat from Google Cloud , the tech giant prefers to focus more on SoC designs where multiple functions sit on the same chip or on multiple chips inside one package , instead of integrating components on a motherboard . The company even claims that the ‘ Systemon-Chips ’ is the modern-day motherboard .
AWS is another cloud provider expressing interest in the chip market . Last year , the company launched custom-built AWS Inferentia chips for the hardware specialisation department . Inferentia ’ s performance convinced AWS to deploy them for their popular Alexa services , which require machine learning to enable functions such as speech processing .
106 June 2022