Microsoft is set to launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips at the upcoming Build conference. These chips, based on the Arm architecture and featuring 128 cores, are expected to offer 40% better performance than other ARM chips currently available on the market. Adobe, Snowflake, and other companies have already started using these new chips.
In addition to the Cobalt chips, Microsoft will also make AMD’s MI300X accelerators available to Azure clients. Despite AMD’s historical lag behind Nvidia in the AI space, these new chips are gaining popularity as cloud providers seek alternatives to Nvidia’s expensive chips and AMD improves its software support.
Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive VP of the Microsoft Cloud and AI group, highlighted the cost-effectiveness of AMD’s MI300X accelerators for Azure OpenAI. This move is expected to provide more affordable options for GPU usage on the Azure platform.
Microsoft will also introduce a new “real-time intelligence system” that allows for real-time data streaming into Fabric, Microsoft’s data analytics system. This system will integrate with popular data-streaming systems like Kafka, AWS Kinesis, and Google Cloud’s Pub/Sub.
Furthermore, Microsoft will announce a partnership with Snowflake. Fabric will now support Snowflake’s Iceberg format, enabling seamless interoperability between the two platforms.
For developers using Copilot, Microsoft plans to launch a new feature that allows them to manage their Azure resources directly from Copilot using natural language. This enhancement aims to provide a tighter developer loop with natural language across the development stack and Azure. Other providers will also have the opportunity to integrate with this feature and offer similar capabilities.
In terms of pricing, Microsoft will drop its pricing for accessing and running large language models. The specifics of this pricing adjustment have yet to be revealed but are expected to be announced at Build.
Overall, Microsoft’s upcoming Build conference promises exciting developments in terms of hardware, partnerships, and software enhancements. The introduction of the Cobalt chips, AMD’s MI300X accelerators, the real-time intelligence system, and the Copilot integration are all geared towards providing developers with more powerful tools and affordable options in the cloud computing space.
