Faster A.I with Microsoft's Brainwave

Alright, after Google announced the TPU(Tensor Processing Unit) to accelerates artificial intelligence systems (by accelerating neural network computations behind the scene). Microsoft not wanting to left behind recently announced Brainwave.

According to reports, the aim of Brainwave is to focus on deep neural nets computing via FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technology. This allows Microsoft to adapt its infrastructure more effectively to cater for the growing demands for artificial intelligence system and also near real-time processing of massive amount of data instead of batch processing.

Rather than harnessing the power of GPU, it seems obvious now that the competitions have driven cloud service providers such as Microsoft and Google to build their own dedicated custom computing chips for machine learning purpose. No news yet on when Brainwave will be available for developers to build machine learning system on. Perhaps soon it will be available as a tier package on Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Image credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U00HkW3WmRs