Peering Into The Future Of Machine Learning Hardware

If you want to see what the future of iron to support machine learning looks like, then perhaps the best place to look at what the hyperscalers and cloud builders who account for the vast majority of processing and applications in this field are deploying. Or, more precisely, look at the iron that their ODM partners are trying to peddle to other companies that is inspired by what the hyperscalers and cloud builders are using. Inspur, one of the upstart makers of infrastructure that is located in China but which is expanding outwards to North America and Europe, is a good case in point. The company has very good insight into what the Big Four in China – Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and either China Mobile or JD.com, depending on how you want to rank numbers four and five – are doing with their vast infrastructure, and it dominates some of these accounts. As we reported back in October 2018, when Inspur was making a push into Open Compute, Inspur has about half of the plain vanilla server shipments and about 80 percent of the GPU accelerated machine learning shipments to the hyperscalers and cloud builders in China. Inspur also works with Microsoft, one of the Big Four in the United States, on its current generation "Project Olympus" servers, the designs of which have been open sourced through the Open Compute Project championed by Facebook alongside some other hyperscale iron that was inspired by Inspur's manufacturing deals with Alibaba and Tencent.