Microsoft held its developer conference called Ignite today. The technology giant made many important announcements during the event. Of course, the thing that stood out the most was artificial intelligence, in which it has recently significantly increased its investments.
An artificial intelligence project that has been secretly developed for years was also announced at the conference. This project was Microsoft’s custom AI chips. The two introduced chips will make Microsoft a rival to NVIDIA in this regard.
Microsoft Azure Maia and Microsoft Azure Cobalt
The chips introduced by Microsoft are Azure Maia Accelerator and Azure Cobalt CPU. It is designed to train artificial intelligence models such as Maia, ChatGPT and Copilot, which go through the 5 nm process. We should also point out that Cobalt is an Arm-based processor designed on the cloud.
Maia will form the basis for the company’s recently released Copilot artificial intelligence model. The chip will also help speed up artificial intelligence processes and facilitate developers’ moves on private artificial intelligence. We can say that this chip, designed in collaboration with OpenAI, will be used for large language models.
Azure Cobalt CPU appears as a 128-core chip. Microsoft stated that this CPU is designed to power Azure’s public cloud services. He added that the Arm-based chip provides both high performance and power efficiency. The Cobalt processor is currently being tested in Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft will start using chips that have the potential to reduce NVIDIA’s dominance in artificial intelligence processors in its data centers at the beginning of next year.
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