Meta Platforms Inc. has just unveiled its new AI chip, the MTIA. This chip is meant to rival Nvidia Corporation’s AI chips in the cloud industry.
What Happened:
On Wednesday, Meta introduced their advanced custom chips for AI tasks. They called these new chips MTIA. These are an upgraded version of the existing MTIA v1 chips. They are made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co using a 5nm process. This is a significant improvement over the first MTIA chips. The first chips were made using a 7nm process.
The MTIA chip is Meta’s first AI inference accelerator. It was created by Meta for its specific needs. This chip’s design balances compute power, memory bandwidth, and memory capacity. It is used for ranking and recommendation models.
Long-term Goals:
Meta aims to create the most effective system for its specialized tasks. Their goal is to enhance their MTIA chips constantly. This is because AI tasks are becoming crucial for their products and services. They want to offer the best user experiences globally.
This new version of MTIA more than doubles the compute and memory bandwidth of our previous solution while maintaining our close tie-in to our workloads, Meta stated. It is designed to efficiently serve the ranking and recommendation models that provide high-quality recommendations to users.
The announcement comes after reports surfaced about TSMC receiving significant funding from the U.S. government for its Arizona plants. This strategic move aims to reduce reliance on Asian suppliers and strengthen the U.S. semiconductor industry.
Why It Matters:
The AI chip industry is evolving. Big tech firms, including Meta, Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc., and Microsoft Corporation, are now making their own AI chips. Their goal is to rival Nvidia, the current market leader.
In January, news came out about big tech companies. They rely on Nvidia’s GPUs for AI tasks. Now, they want to depend on them less. By October 2023, it was said that OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is considering making its AI chips.
The EU is closely watching the AI chip market. It is looking for any unfair practices. The focus is mainly on big companies like Nvidia. This is because Nvidia dominates the market.
Final Thoughts:
Meta has launched the MTIA chip. This is a big event in the AI chip industry. It could challenge Nvidia, which currently leads the market. Many big tech companies are now making their own AI chips. It will be interesting to watch how this changes the market soon.
Source: Benzinga
You may want to check an article on AI in the March 2024 issue of ENTECH Magazine.
