Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned.
In an analyst briefing ahead of the build, Scott Guthrie, executive VP of Microsoft’s Microsoft Cloud and AI group, directly compared Cobalt to AWS’s Graviton chips, which have been available to developers for several years. Guthrie said Microsoft’s chips will deliver up to 40% better performance than other ARM chips on the market. Adobe, Snowflake and others have already started using the new chips.
Microsoft first announces its Cobalt chips last November, These 64-bit chips are based on Arm architecture and have 128 cores.
In addition to the Cobalt chips, Microsoft will also make AMD’s MI300X accelerators available to Azure customers next week. Despite being a major GPU maker, AMD has long lagged behind Nvidia in the AI field, but as big cloud providers look for alternatives to Nvidia’s expensive chips — and AMD — AMD has made up some ground in this area by offering better software support. These new chips are now a hot commodity as well.
Guthrie describes it as “the most cost-effective GPU currently available for Azure OpenAI”.
Other news we got is that Microsoft will be lowering its pricing for getting access to and running larger language models in Build next week. What this will actually look like is unclear, however.
Microsoft will also go into preview with a new “Real-Time Intelligence System” that will allow real-time data streaming into Microsoft’s data analytics system fabric. The system will provide native Kafka integration as well as support for AWS Kinesis and Google Cloud pub/sub Data-streaming systems.
Microsoft will also announce a partnership with Snowflake. Fabric will now support Snowflake’s Iceberg format (in addition to Databricks’ Parquet), which will “enable seamless interoperability with Snowflake and enable any data present in Snowflake to be exposed in Fabric and vice versa.”
And for you Copilot fans: Microsoft is planning to launch a new feature that will allow developers to manage their Azure resources directly from Copilot using natural language. “It’s going to enable an even tighter developer loop with natural language in your development stack and in Azure,” Guthrie said. That system is built on top of a common extensibility mechanism, so other providers will be able to plug in and provide similar capabilities.
exclusive-microsofts-custom-cobalt-chips-will-come-to-azure-next-week
