Business and Technology

Facebook developing in-house machine learning chips

Facebook is developing its own suite of machine learning chips to handle common workloads on its social media platforms. The Information reports that one chip processes machine learning for tasks such as recommending content to users, while another focuses on handling video transcoding. The move should not come as a huge surprise – back in 2018, Facebook hired the founder of Google’s hardware technology engineering team and consumer silicon team, Shahriar Rabii, and appointed him as its new Head of Silicon.

The initiative also echoes similar steps by other hyperscalers to take advantage of their large scale, and their understanding of their own workloads, to develop specific chips that are more efficient, and reduce their reliance on companies like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

Earlier this year, Google revealed that it developed a custom ‘Argos’ video-transcoding chip to provide “up to 20-33x improvements in compute efficiency compared” to its previous traditional server setup. Google also developed its own TPU family of AI processors, Titan security chip line, and this year hired Intel’s Uri Frank to build a System on Chip.

Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, has its own Arm CPU line Graviton, as well as AI training (Trainium) and inference (Inferentia) chips. Microsoft is believed to also be working on its own Arm chips.

Source: datacenterdynamics

In other news – Beyoncé and Jay-Z pledge R28m for scholarships

Beyoncé and Jay-Z have teamed up with Tiffany & Co. and pledged R28 million to fund college scholarships at five historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Beyoncé and Jay Z

The couple – who have daughter Blue Ivy, nine, and twins Rumi and Sir, four, together – have teamed up with Tiffany & Co. to fund places at five historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) via their charities BeyGOOD and Shawn Carter Foundation as part of their About Love campaign. Learn more