News | Microsoft introduces the "Maia 100" artificial intelligence accelerator and the "Cobalt 100" processor

On November 15, the United States time, Microsoft announced at the annual developer conference Microsoft Ignite 2023, which was previously expected to be released as a custom cloud computing chip "Microsoft Azure Maia 100 AI Accelerator" for Microsoft Azure cloud services. . The company says the chip is optimized for tasks such as generating artificial intelligence (AI).

Image from Microsoft

The Maia 100 is said to be the first product in the AI accelerator series Maia. Microsoft said the product incorporates 105 billion transistors and is "one of the largest chip products to use a 5-nanometer (1 nanometer is a billionth of a meter) process technology."

In addition, the company announced the launch of Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100, its first internally developed cloud computing processor. Cobalt 100 is based on the ARM-based instruction set architecture. The architecture has been licensed by Arm Holdings and is used by a number of companies, including NVIDIA and Apple.

CEO Satya Nadella introduces Azure Cobalt processors.

Image courtesy of Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET

Microsoft said the Cobalt 100, a 64-bit processor with 128 computing cores on the chip, is expected to deliver a performance boost of up to 40 percent over other ARM-based chips used by Microsoft Azure, which he said is achievable. The company also says Cobalt 100 is already being used in projects such as Microsoft Teams and Azure SQL.

Image from Microsoft

According to the company, the Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 boast network bandwidth of up to 200GB/s and data throughput of up to 12.5GB/s.

With the release of cloud/AI custom processors, all three major cloud companies have entered the space. Google kicked off the custom processor race in 2016 with its tensor Processing Unit (TPU), and Amazon Web Services (AWS) followed with a series of processors, including AWS Graviton, AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia.

Microsoft emphasized that it will continue to work with NVIDIA and AMD to supply processors for Azure. In 2024, the company plans to add its newest GPU, the "NVIDIA H200," which uses NVIDIA's "Hopper" architecture, as well as AMD's rival GPU, the "AMD Instinct MI300."

Microsoft's processors will power programs like GitHub Copilot, as well as generative AI from AI startup OpenAI. Microsoft has invested $11 billion in OpenAI and has an exclusive partnership with it.

Image from John Brecher of Microsoft

Data reference:

Source: ZDNET

Link: [https://japan.zdnet.com/]

Page Title: [MS、「Maia 100」AIアクセラレーターと「Cobalt 100」プロセッサーを発表]