Microsoft Preps Athena 5nm AI Chip For Its Own Use, Saving The Company Billions of Dollars
Microsoft is developing a new AI chip known as Athena which will be utilizing TSMC's 5nm process node, reports The Information. This is not part of Intel's Project Athena innovation program. In fact, the Microsoft Athena chip has been in development for four years.
The Microsoft Athena chip will utilize the TSMC 5nm process, to begin with, but does plan to create several more generations of chips in the future. This will allow the company to save overhead from purchasing chips from other suppliers, such as AI giant NVIDIA.
The news comes a few months after the company integrated OpenAI into its Bing Search Engine & is seeing wide use in the Microsoft Edge web browser. OpenAI received billions of dollars from Microsoft to use the company's technology that created ChatGPT. Athena will be used to educate large-language models, also known as LLMs, and any data acquired during and after the training of the LLMs.
The Information explains that its sources discovered a minor group within Microsoft and OpenAI currently working with the chips, hinting that prototypes are already being developed and used. If the sources are correct, the chips would be ready quite soon, with sources quoting "as early as next year" for the chips to see mass production, whether these chips will be used within Microsoft's proprietary Azure platform or available to other data center customers not using the company's servers.
Athena, if competitive, could reduce the cost per chip by a third when compared with NVIDIA's offerings.
— Dylan Patel of the research firm SemiAnalysis in an interview with The Information.
Most LLMs are usually based on NVIDIA's designs. NVIDIA has several high-powered AI GPUs that are used globally but are expensive to adopt into most
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