microsoft has revealed its new Maia 200 accelerator chip for artificial intelligence (AI) that is three times more powerful than hardware from rivals like Google and Amazon, company representatives say.
This newest chip will be used in AI inference rather than training,powering systems and agents used to make predictions,provide answers to queries and generate outputs based on new data that’s fed to them.
The new chip delivers performance of more than 10 petaflops (1015 floating point operations per second), Scott Guthrie, cloud and AI executive vice president at Microsoft, said in a blog post.This is a measure of performance in supercomputing, where the most powerful supercomputers in the world can reach more than 1,000 petaflops of power.
The new chip achieved this performance level in a data depiction category known as “4-bit precision (FP4)” — a highly compressed model designed to accelerate AI performance. Maia 200 also delivers 5 PFLOPS of performance in 8-bit precision (FP8). The difference between the two is that FP4 is far more energy effici
