The moonshot that succeeded: How Bing and Azure are using an AI supercomputer in the cloud - Next at Microsoft

When we type in a search query, access our email via the cloud or stream a viral video, chances are we don't spend any time thinking about the technological plumbing that is behind that instant gratification. They are engineers who spend their days thinking about ever-better and faster ways to get you all that information with the tap of a finger, as you've come to expect. A team of Microsoft engineers and researchers, working together, has created a system that uses a reprogrammable computer chip called a field programmable gate array, or FPGA, to accelerate Bing and Azure. Utilizing the FPGA chips, Lanka and Chiou's teams can write their algorithms directly onto the hardware they are using, instead of using potentially less efficient software as the middle man. What's more, an FPGA can be reprogrammed at a moment's notice to respond to new advances in artificial intelligence or meet another type of unexpected need in a datacenter.