The chips FB are working on are probably far more similar to Google's TPUs than anything NVIDIA makes though.
So they need a second supplier? Do what the government do, and demand that there be a second source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source or you won't buy their product, or give money to some other company or companies for whom that is a core competency.
>> so it's critically important that one or both of them break the monopoly by becoming a fabless chip designer
You say this with great certainty, that almost got me on board, but saying something with certainty does not make it right. It's not critically important - what's the worst that can happen in the short term - they pay a bit more because of the monopoly? You make it sound like if the chip monopoly isn't broken then doom will befall them all. Piffle. If there is such great demand for these chips then there are plenty of other silicon companies who can be attracted by the smell of demand.
What would make sense is for Facebook to claim to be making their own to strengthen their negotiating position with the supplier, but with no real plan to design their own chip.
This is what you do when your company is a cash cow, you earn so much money that even reinvesting it in the core business doesn't impact your always growing revenue and profits. Also, it is refreshing that new companies are entering the classical semiconductors market, lots of positive externalities.
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/building-ai-chip-saved-google-... Google's TPU Chip Helped It Avoid Building Dozens of New Data ...
I think you'd be hard pressed to find people willing trade significant performance for the option of running applications on AMD's less power efficient processors.
Modern GPUs have very little specialized graphics hardware. This doesn't mean there aren't better architectures, but this idea that it's bad cause it's a graphics accelerator is horribly out of date.
GPUs were largely programmable parallel processors by the time they became in vogue for deep learning.
Bill Dally (nVidia chief scientist) has said that the hard wired graphics takes up so little die area that it is essentially negligible in terms of cost for them.
Plus, the latest Volta chips have "tensor cores" the equivalent of little TPUs.