People are making fun of facebook/google for expanding beyond core competency, but this is a market (AI training / inference) where Nvidia has a very real monopoly that facebook and google must rely on for core competency products, so it's critically important that one or both of them break the monopoly by becoming a fabless chip designer and partnering with TSMC (or whoever) to make training and inference chips. It's absolutely the right decision today, and if there was one viable alternative to Nvidia (which AMD and Intel are not), it wouldn't be necessary.
The entire reason that AMD hardware isn't considered a viable alternative to NVIDIA is that it doesn't run CUDA, which is going to be true of these custom chips too.
The chips FB are working on are probably far more similar to Google's TPUs than anything NVIDIA makes though.
I don't agree that because the primary supplier is a monopoly is justification for doing something as distracting and risky as designing your own chips.
So they need a second supplier? Do what the government do, and demand that there be a second source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source or you won't buy their product, or give money to some other company or companies for whom that is a core competency.
>> so it's critically important that one or both of them break the monopoly by becoming a fabless chip designer
You say this with great certainty, that almost got me on board, but saying something with certainty does not make it right. It's not critically important - what's the worst that can happen in the short term - they pay a bit more because of the monopoly? You make it sound like if the chip monopoly isn't broken then doom will befall them all. Piffle. If there is such great demand for these chips then there are plenty of other silicon companies who can be attracted by the smell of demand.
What would make sense is for Facebook to claim to be making their own to strengthen their negotiating position with the supplier, but with no real plan to design their own chip.
I am not sure many still argue core compute is not gf's core competency. If there are still many, I'd say they did a good job of hiding core competency.
So they are going to design their own chips for the consumer devices (Oculus Go and the speakers)? Those are two very different use cases, heavy 3D and speakers generally are simple. I am not sure Facebook will have sufficient volume of either of those to justify making its own chips. Apple sold 250M iPhones in 2017. Facebook sold less than 1M Oculus Rifts in 2018.
The other place that Facebook could use its own chips is in its datacenter. This would make a little more sense as it is easier to deploy custom chips into a datacenter you fully control. There are theoretically cost and energy savings possible from switching from Xeon D to ARM in the datacenter at Facebook's scale.
I think the point is not to become a chip producer, but to cut a hard point of dependency. My point is easier to understand for software development. Imagine a society outsourcing 100% of its software development. If it has a problem with a provider, it has no other solution than to ask another one. As all providers have similar business logic, the problem may not be solved. Imagine the society outsources only 95% of its software development. It has a lot more power over its providers because it can decide to do conflictual projects in-house. IMHO all societies should keep technical expertise of their key technologies by having some internal developments (software and if possible hardware).
This is likely the FB job listing: https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0I1H00000LgnqFUAR/ Looks like all of the difficulty of building a hardware startup, while maintaining all of the downside of being part of a large company.
[IIRC, Cisco used the "spin-in" model to great advantage in order to address some of the downside. However, that was 10-20 years ago, and I don't know any recent examples.]
Yann LeCun posted the ad for this yesterday on FB.
Maybe they are doing Oculus too, but it sounds a lot to me like they are doing custom A.I. related silicon.
There's a well proven path showing that custom silicon can save energy relatively easily on inference ML tasks. Competing with NVidia on training is harder of course, but maybe possible for specific tasks.
You do realize that FB has been designing their own servers for years, right? Also, what does personal data privacy have to do with silicon design? I know that FB privacy rules are a hot topic right now but how does that have anything to do with this article?
They can spend say $5 million in employee time and fpga devkits and know within a few percent what the chip performance is, and they have a huge corpus for testing. Doesn't seem to be a huge financial risk.
This makes perfect sense. It's all about economics both w respect to intel and nvidia. You can't be paying 8-10k per gpu, and you are not going to pay that when you can make something far cheaper and faster. Google got this done in what two years?? All the debates around the tech comparisons miss the economic picture. Who cares if 4tpu's being compared to one volta. Point is those 4 chips together cheaper than buying one v100. Bitcoin mining no different. Do you care how many chips (196) are in an antminer s9? No! What matters is that it mines 13000x faster than a gpu for roughly double the price. Facebook, Amazon and the likes have every incentive to go down this custom ASIC path. Google is now hiring sales folks for their tpu cloud. There is a reason they are not selling the hardware. It's more valuable to them to get tenants the other hyperscale competition can't match. So think all the hyperscale guys now looking for ways to keep up which obviously is horrible for nvidia. A lot of people have missed how much of nvidia's story been about essentially killing it on one very narrow use case, ml training, in a very short time. This is basically 50%+ of all profit growth they have achieved last two years. Nvidia has got some serious challenges ahead.
Sorry you are getting down-voted. In fact, Intel and AMD have thousands of undocumented instructions that folks have only started [1] to enumerate. Even then, some of the instructions may not be visible through this method of enumeration. FB would have the option to add their own instructions. I would be curious to see how transparent they might be around the production and documentation of these chips.
Possibly. Copyright laws protect closed source hardware/software everywhere, so anyone putting spyware into a closed source chip would gain one more perfectly legal layer of protection against auditors.
I love when companies wander beyond their core business and venture on something they are not familiar! That idea has everything to work it out just fine, don't worry!
Apple should only do desktop PCs. Music players, that's ridiculous.
Oracle should only do databases.
Google should stick to search. What do they know about operating systems? They also have no business running their own datacenters, what could they possibly know about allocating ten billion dollars in capital annually to such an operation.
Amazon is a retailer. Cloud services, artificial intelligence, devices, is that a joke?
Intel makes memory chips, what do they know about processors?
Facebook has $41 billion in cash. They're about to start piling up $20 billion per year. Zero debt.
They can do almost anything they want to within reason and not worry about the financial consequences. Their shareholders will be a lot more upset if they don't take pragmatic business risks and pursue opportunity.
It's a very logical extension of the project that became Open Compute, which started at Facebook back in 2009 and was announced two years later [1].
Facebook has been running its own datacenters, first in colos and now fully purpose-built, for nearly a decade and a half at this point. That hardware design done by a company isn't familiar to you doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
And that's not even mentioning the now nearly four years old Oculus acquisition or the resources Facebook has been pouring into AI/ML research and applications.
[+] [-] Talyen42|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opencl|8 years ago|reply
The chips FB are working on are probably far more similar to Google's TPUs than anything NVIDIA makes though.
[+] [-] hoodoof|8 years ago|reply
So they need a second supplier? Do what the government do, and demand that there be a second source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source or you won't buy their product, or give money to some other company or companies for whom that is a core competency.
>> so it's critically important that one or both of them break the monopoly by becoming a fabless chip designer
You say this with great certainty, that almost got me on board, but saying something with certainty does not make it right. It's not critically important - what's the worst that can happen in the short term - they pay a bit more because of the monopoly? You make it sound like if the chip monopoly isn't broken then doom will befall them all. Piffle. If there is such great demand for these chips then there are plenty of other silicon companies who can be attracted by the smell of demand.
What would make sense is for Facebook to claim to be making their own to strengthen their negotiating position with the supplier, but with no real plan to design their own chip.
[+] [-] jacksmith21006|8 years ago|reply
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/building-ai-chip-saved-google-... Google's TPU Chip Helped It Avoid Building Dozens of New Data ...
[+] [-] justicezyx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arbuge|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhouston|8 years ago|reply
The other place that Facebook could use its own chips is in its datacenter. This would make a little more sense as it is easier to deploy custom chips into a datacenter you fully control. There are theoretically cost and energy savings possible from switching from Xeon D to ARM in the datacenter at Facebook's scale.
[+] [-] reacweb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpmattia|8 years ago|reply
[IIRC, Cisco used the "spin-in" model to great advantage in order to address some of the downside. However, that was 10-20 years ago, and I don't know any recent examples.]
[+] [-] supahfly_remix|8 years ago|reply
https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/cisco-sharpens-sdn-foc...
[+] [-] foobaw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|8 years ago|reply
Maybe they are doing Oculus too, but it sounds a lot to me like they are doing custom A.I. related silicon.
There's a well proven path showing that custom silicon can save energy relatively easily on inference ML tasks. Competing with NVidia on training is harder of course, but maybe possible for specific tasks.
[+] [-] deboboy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kickopotomus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickg_zill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ai2323|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxBender|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sandsifter
[+] [-] str33t_punk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yw2123123|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarefoot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Romanulus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noir_lord|8 years ago|reply
As in "The handling of Cambridge Analytica was a complete clusterzuck from the start".
[+] [-] raister|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|8 years ago|reply
Apple should only do desktop PCs. Music players, that's ridiculous.
Oracle should only do databases.
Google should stick to search. What do they know about operating systems? They also have no business running their own datacenters, what could they possibly know about allocating ten billion dollars in capital annually to such an operation.
Amazon is a retailer. Cloud services, artificial intelligence, devices, is that a joke?
Intel makes memory chips, what do they know about processors?
Facebook has $41 billion in cash. They're about to start piling up $20 billion per year. Zero debt.
They can do almost anything they want to within reason and not worry about the financial consequences. Their shareholders will be a lot more upset if they don't take pragmatic business risks and pursue opportunity.
[+] [-] elgenie|8 years ago|reply
Facebook has been running its own datacenters, first in colos and now fully purpose-built, for nearly a decade and a half at this point. That hardware design done by a company isn't familiar to you doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
And that's not even mentioning the now nearly four years old Oculus acquisition or the resources Facebook has been pouring into AI/ML research and applications.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/building...
[+] [-] borplk|8 years ago|reply