How Microsoft built CPUs 100x faster than Intel’s

Over the last 4 years, Microsoft researcher Doug Burger and Bing’s Qi Lu have been working on “Project Catapault”.

Project Catapult reports Wired, “would equip all of Microsoft’s servers—millions of them—with specialized chips that the company could reprogram for particular tasks”.

Those programmable chips that Burger and Lu believed would transform the world are now here.

They are called field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and besides already underpinning Bing, in the coming weeks will drive new search algorithms based on deep neural networks, executing several orders of magnitude faster than ordinary chips could.

Just how fast are they?

“Burger and team took Putnam’s Christmas sketch and built a prototype, showing that it could run Bing’s machine learning algorithms about 100 times faster.”

We are talking “23 milliseconds instead of four seconds of nothing on your screen”.

Conventional processors from companies such as Intel cannot keep up with Moore’s Law, but these FPGA chips can maintain the required computing growth.

And the best part is that FPGA chips are now Microsoft’s standard, worldwide architecture.

“It’s generally too expensive to create specialized, purpose-built chips for every new problem. FPGAs bridge the gap.”

“They let engineers build chips that are faster and less energy-hungry than an assembly-line, general-purpose CPU, but customizable so they handle the new problems of ever-shifting technologies and business models.”