Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens Wu Yanzu in South China, Brother Black fly's left-hand clue delivery! CTOnews.com, November 16, at today's Ignite developer conference in Seattle, Microsoft officially unveiled two self-developed AI chips to enhance Azure AI and Microsoft Copilot services, respectively, Azure Maia 100 and Azure Cobalt 100.

The chips are designed to speed up AI computing tasks and provide a computing base for users of its $30-a-month "Copilot" service and enterprise software, as well as for developers who want to create custom AI services.

Azure Maia 100: this is an ASIC chip designed for Azure cloud services and AI workloads for x86 hosts.

The chip will be installed in a custom liquid-cooled rack and can hold up to 4 chips at the same time. The chip will support standard INT8 and INT4 data formats and utilize embedded Ethernet interfaces.

The chip is based on TSMC 5nm nodes and can support a variety of AI scenarios, including natural language processing, computer vision, recommendation systems and generated AI.

It integrates seamlessly with the Azure software stack, including Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure Synapse Analytics, providing high performance, efficiency, and flexibility.

The Maia chip is designed to run a large language model, an AI software that supports Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service, which is a product of Microsoft's partnership with ChatGPT developer OpenAI.

Microsoft said it did not intend to sell the chips, but instead used them to empower its own subscription software products as part of its Azure cloud computing service.

Microsoft and other tech giants such as Alphabet are grappling with the high cost of providing AI services, which could be 10 times more expensive than traditional services such as search engines.

Microsoft executives say they plan to solve these problems by handling almost all of the company's AI product work through a common basic AI model. It is said that the Maia chip is optimized for this purpose.

"We think this provides us with the ability to provide faster, lower cost and higher quality solutions to our customers," said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft Cloud and AI Group.

Microsoft also said that next year it will provide Azure customers with cloud services running on the latest flagship chips of Nvidia and AMD. Microsoft says it is testing OpenAI's state-of-the-art model, GPT 4, on AMD chips.

"this is not a replacement for Nvidia," said Ben Bajarin, chief executive of analyst firm Creative Strategies.

He said the Maia chip would enable Microsoft to sell AI services in the cloud before personal computers and mobile phones were powerful enough to handle them.

"Microsoft has a very different core technology opportunity here because every user of their service can make a lot of money," Bajarin said.

Azure Cobalt 100: this is an Arm chip designed to run general computing workloads on Microsoft Cloud. This chip can provide high-density, high-reliability and high-security computing services for Web applications, databases, containers and micro-services.

It is also compatible with Azure's ecosystem, including Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Functions, and Azure App Service. The advantage of this chip is that it can provide a computing platform with low cost, low power consumption and low carbon emissions to support the goal of sustainable development.

Microsoft says it has a total of 128 Neoverse N2 cores and supports 12 channels of DDR5 memory, with a 40 per cent improvement in performance compared to the upcoming ARM server chip.

Microsoft also revealed that it is already trying to use Cobalt to empower Teams.

Microsoft Guthrie said it also wants to sell the right to use Cobalt directly to customers to compete with the "Graviton" series of chips offered by AWS.

"We are designing our Cobalt solution to ensure that we are competitive in terms of performance and price-performance (compared to Amazon chips)," Guthrie said.

AWS will hold its own developer conference later this month, and a spokesman said its Graviton chip now has 50, 000 customers.

"AWS will continue to innovate to provide next-generation AWS-designed chips for any customer workload they need to provide better performance-to-price ratio," the spokesman said after Microsoft announced its chips.

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