- Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has been moving some of its own computing for the Alexa voice assistant to its own chips
In a report by Reuters today, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has moved some of its own computing for the Alexa voice assistant to its own chips. These changes are expected to make computing faster and cheaper by reducing the company’s dependence on chips made by Nvidia.
After a user asks an Alexa-based device a question, the query is sent to an Amazon data center to be processed. And when a response is generated, the reply is in a text format that translates into audible speech for the voice assistant.
Amazon has been performing this computing mostly based on chips from Nvidia, but now Apple is going to move a majority of it to the “Inferentia” computing chip. Back in 2018, Amazon first revealed “Inferentia,” which is a chip that was custom-designed for handling large volumes of machine learning tasks like text translations and image recognition.
Amazon is not the only major tech company to announce a switch to its own chips this week. On Tuesday, Apple revealed its own proprietary M1 chipsets will be used for powering the new line of Macs.
The switch to the Infertia chip for Alexa is expected to have 25% better latency and a 30% lower cost.
Disclosure: I have a small AMZN position in my stock portfolio.
