04/11/2024

Meta Unveils its Newest Custom AI Chip

The company is racing to catch up

Meta, hell-bent on catching up to rivals in the generative artificial intelligence (AI) space, is spending billions on its own AI efforts. A portion of those billions is going toward recruiting AI researchers. But an even larger chunk is being spent developing hardware, specifically chips to run and train Meta’s AI models.

Meta unveiled the newest fruit of its chip dev efforts today, conspicuously a day after Intel announced its latest AI accelerator hardware. Called the “next-gen” Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA), the successor to last year’s MTIA v1, the chip runs models including for ranking and recommending display ads on Meta’s properties (e.g. Facebook).

Compared to MTIA v1, which was built on a 7nm process, the next-gen MTIA is 5nm. (In chip manufacturing, “process” refers to the size of the smallest component that can be built on the chip.) The next-gen MTIA is a physically larger design, packed with more processing cores than its predecessor. And while it consumes more power — 90W versus 25W — it also boasts more internal memory (128MB versus 64MB) and runs at a higher average clock speed (1.35GHz up from 800MHz).

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