What Makes an AI Chip?

I haven't been able to understand why the original chip pioneers, like Intel and AMD, have not been able to pivot in order to compete with NVidia (Stock Symbol: NVDA).

I know a few things, like the fact that when gaming became popular, NVidia made the graphics chips that had graphics acceleration and such. Graphics tend to draw polygons, and drawing polygons is geometric and trigonometric - which require floating point arithmetic (non-integer based mathematics). Floating point is difficult for a CPU to do, so much so that classical CPUs either offloaded or employed other tricks to do these kinds of computations.

Now, these graphics chips are the "rave" for AI. And Nvidia stock has gone through the roof while Intel and AMD have been left behind.

So what does an AI chip have, that is different from an older CPU?

• Graphics processing units (GPUs) - used mainly for training AI models
  
• Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) - used mainly for inference
  
• Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) - used in various capacities of AI

CPUs use all three of these in some form or another, but an AI chip has all three of these in a highly optimized and accelerated design. Things like prediction (such as branching prediction), parallelism, etc. They're simply better at running "algorithms".

This link, by the way, from NVidia, discusses the distinction between Training and Inference:
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/difference-deep-learning-training-inference-ai/

CPUs, they were so bent on running Microsoft for so long, and emulating continuous revisions of instructions to run Windows (286-->386-->486-->Pentium--> and on and on), that they just never went back and "rearchitected" or came up with new chip architectures. They sat back and collected money, along with Microsoft, to give you incremental versions of the same thing - for YEARS.

When you are doing training for an AI model, and you are running algorithmic loops millions upon millions of times, the efficiency and time start to add up - and make a huge difference in $$$ (MONEY). 

So the CPU companies, in order to "catch up", I think, with NVidia, would need to come up with a whole bunch of chip design software. Then there is the software kits necessary to develop to the chips. You also have the foundry (which uses manufacturing equipment, much of it custom per the design), etc. Meanwhile, NVidia has its rocket off the ground, with decreasing G forces (so to speak), which accelerates its orbit. It is easy to see why an increasing gap would occur.

But - when you have everyone (China, Russia, Intel, AMD, ARM, et al) all racing to catch up, they will at some point, catch up. I think. When NVidia slows down. We shall see.