Microsoft Ends Moore's Law, Builds a Supercomputer in the Cloud

A group of Microsoft engineers have built an artificial intelligence technique called deep neural networks that will be deployed on Catapult by the end of 2016 to power Bing search results. They say that this AI supercomputer in the cloud will increase the speed and efficiency of Microsoft's data centers and that their will be a noticeable difference obvious to Bing search engine users. They say that this is the "The slow but eventual end of Moore's Law." "Utilizing the FPGA chips, Microsoft engineering (Sitaram Lanka and Derek Chiou) teams can write their algorithms directly onto the hardware they are using, instead of using potentially less efficient software as the middle man," notes Microsoft blogger Allison Linn. "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."