Microsoft

For those who marveled at the $16.7 billion deal Intel made to acquire field programmable gate array maker, Altera, an equal number raised eyebrows at the estimate given by Intel CEO to announce the purchase that one-third of cloud workloads would take advantage of FPGA acceleration by 2020. …

Back in the late 1980s, while working in the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs, deep leaning pioneer, Yann LeCun, was just starting down the path of implementing brain-inspired machine learning concepts for image recognition and processing—an effort that would eventually lead to some of the first realizations of these technologies in voice recognition for calling systems and handwriting analysis for banks. …

Amazon Web Services may be the 800-pound silverback alpha-ape in the rapidly expanding cloud industry, seeing as how its infrastructure revenue is greater than its four closest competitors combined, but that hasn’t stopped its fast-growing challenger, Microsoft Azure, from beating its own chest and showing off its strengths. …