From Nvidia's history of working with AIBs, Sony, Apple, the Linux community, and probably many more, they seem to be a very hard company to work with. They have an idea of what the product looks like and it's their way or the highway. I wonder if this new department will change that. If it doesn't, it won't amount to much.
Just today I was reading the article about OpenAI wanting $7T to develop their own AI chips. In the comments were a bunch of people talking about all the startups in the last 18 months trying to make bespoke AI chips.<p>This makes a lot of sense for NVIDIA. They have the expertise, the money, the <i>scale</i>, and the experience already. They can probably do it cheaper than any startup and then either pass on that savings or make more profit.
I would assume instead of Google and Microsoft designing their own ARM Processor on the server using ARM's IP with custom design. Nvidia could do that for them. After all Microsoft and Google dont have the economy of scale, nor do they have the ( or as much ) expertise. Nvidia could also provide other IPs such as Network, Ethernet and other GPGPU integration. I guess that is why they are in talks with Ericsson. Ericsson has a history of working with Intel and Intel failed to deliver.<p>Basically I think Nvidia will now move all the sunk cost of New Node to every new generation of AI chip. While the rest of the business unit, from GPU, Network, SoC, and now Custom Chips benefits from it. I am even wondering if Nvidia will come back to Smartphone Mobile SoC.
I wonder if customers really want custom chips or just cheaper ones. Many of these custom AI chips are slower than flagship GPUs so presumably a cut-down GPU at a lower price would be just as good.
I imagine there will be cheaper service providers soon for training (2024/2025). Like what companies such as Hetzner, Digital Ocean and others are providing for cloud. They are not in the same league of AWS, Google Cloud, Azure but can add more specific cloud services.
I read about a new approach for making AI chips sometime last year - analogue chips by this company - <a href="https://mythic.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://mythic.ai/</a><p>Haven't heard anything about it since though.