Microsoft launches chips for artificial intelligence in the cloud
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The FT title is actually repeating a bit of MS marketing spin. One of the chips is a general purpose CPU:
Microsoft Azure Maia 100 AI Accelerator and the Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 CPU.
Maia has 105 billion transistors that are manufactured on a 5-nm TSMC process. Meanwhile, Cobalt is a 128-core ARM-based CPU designed to do conventional computing tasks like power Microsoft Teams.
These are actually ridiculously huge chips, for comparison Nvidia’s H100 AI accelerator is estimated at only 80 billion transistors and a 128-core ARM server chip rivals AWS 128-core 3rd-gen Graviton chips.
Very interesting, that MS went all-in on ARM over x86 Epyc or Xeon. Could this have a knock-on effect for WOA development?
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Sounds like MS is focusing its silicon efforts on the server side - no pesky Qualcomm exclusivity like with WOA.
Competition for Intel on a new front.