Microsoft’s search engine Bing will run on FPGAs early next year

Microsoft will switch to FPGAs for its data centers early next year. The company decided this after a pilot proved successful, Wired writes. The use of fpgas, in particular, should make search engine Bing faster.

Microsoft considered switching to FPGAs two years ago after a Microsoft Research employee came up with the idea. The company started a pilot with 1,600 servers and it turned out to be successful, Wired reports. Microsoft will therefore switch to circuits with programmable logic components early next year.

With the FPGAs, Microsoft is building a network consisting of exactly 1,632 servers, all of which have separate Intel Xeon processors and FPGA chips from Altera. Known internally as Project Catapult, the system is said to primarily handle Bing’s search terms. One of the contributors behind the project, Doug Burger, told Wired that the fpgas can process Bing’s algorithms 40 times faster than regular CPUs. With some of the work still being done by the Xeon CPUs, Microsoft thinks the search engine could be twice as fast as Bing is overall.

Microsoft expects to be able to update the chips as often as it does with the software behind the Bing search engine due to the adjustment in its data centers. Burger says it’s not uncommon to roll out a chip update every week.