Meta is engaged on a brand new chip for AI

Meta is constructing its first customized chip particularly for operating AI fashions, the corporate introduced on Thursday. As Meta will increase its AI efforts — CEO Mark Zuckerberg not too long ago mentioned the corporate sees “a chance to introduce AI brokers to billions of individuals in ways in which shall be helpful and significant” — the chip and different infrastructure plans revealed Thursday may very well be vital instruments for Meta to compete with different tech giants additionally investing vital assets into AI.

Meta’s new MTIA chip, which stands for Meta Coaching and Inference Accelerator, is its “in-house, customized accelerator chip household focusing on inference workloads,” Meta VP and head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan wrote in a weblog submit. The chip apparently offers “better compute energy and effectivity” than CPUs and is “personalized for our inside workloads.” With a mix of MTIA chips and GPUs, Janardhan mentioned that Meta believes “we’ll ship higher efficiency, decreased latency, and better effectivity for every workload.”

Along with the MTIA, Meta can also be introducing a brand new ASIC particularly to assist with video transcoding, which it calls the “MSVP,” or Meta Scalable Video Processor. It’s designed to help each “the high-quality transcoding wanted for VOD in addition to the low latency and sooner processing occasions that stay streaming requires,” Meta mentioned in a separate weblog submit, and “sooner or later,” it should assist convey issues like AI-made content material and AR- and VR-specific content material to Meta’s apps.

Meta can also be engaged on a “next-generation knowledge middle design” that shall be “AI-optimized” and “sooner and cheaper to construct,” Janardhan mentioned, and the corporate additionally touted the ability of its Analysis SuperCluster (RSC) AI Supercomputer, “which we imagine is among the quickest AI supercomputers on this planet.” This isn’t precisely new rhetoric in regards to the RSC from Meta; the corporate has been sharing excessive reward in regards to the supercomputer since final yr. However as the corporate tries to face out towards an growing variety of AI initiatives from most of the greatest know-how giants — together with different customized chips —it is sensible that Meta would need to brag about its religion in its personal AI {hardware}.