Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft

Re:Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft by amelius on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @08:34AM (#12635030)

> When you think about machine learning, especially deep neural nets, it turns out GPUs are much better at performance and scale for those algorithms

Perhaps we should stop calling them GPUs. Now seems a good time for it.

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Re:Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft by freehunter on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @08:59AM (#12635162)

Like DVDs, the name is kind of stuck. There, they switched from Digital Video Discs to Digital Versatile Discs. How about switching your mind from Graphics Processing Units to General-purpose Processing Units?

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Re:Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft by Nullabillity on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @10:32AM (#12635805)

Also known as GPGPU.

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Re:Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft by nivertech on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @12:19PM (#12636616)

GPU - General Purpose Unit ;)

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Re:Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft by castis on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @08:37AM (#12635045)

What do you propose we call them?

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Re:Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft by WorldMaker on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @11:11AM (#12636121)

Geometric Processing Units? The "magic" of this renaissance in GPU processing seems mostly to just be the (maybe unsurprising) versatility of Euclidean Geometry to a wide variety of problem domains.

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Re:Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft by lifebeyondfife on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @08:54AM (#12635131)

Parallel Processing Units?

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Re:Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft by qwertyuiop924 on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @09:26AM (#12635287)

Hyper-Parallel Independent Processing Units?

Standard Hyperparallel Integrated Technology?

I do so love fun with acronyms...

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Re:Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft by jbpetersen on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @11:05AM (#12636073)

Vector Processing Units

It does a good job of communicating their main functionality.

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Re:Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft by n00b101 on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @10:28AM (#12635768)

What do you propose we call them?

AIPUs

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