Microsoft plans to provide Azure cloud computing customers with an Azure service based on AMD artificial intelligence chips, and specific details will be announced at next week's Build Developer Conference.
According to media reports on Friday (May 17th), AMD's flagship product MI300X GPU chip cluster will be sold through Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service. This indicates that Microsoft intends to provide an alternative to the Nvidia H100 series GPUs for its cloud clients.
AMD is a major GPU manufacturer, but has been lagging behind Nvidia in the field of artificial intelligence.
However, due to the high price and difficulty in obtaining Nvidia H100 GPUs, large cloud providers are looking for alternatives to Nvidia's expensive chips, and AMD has made some progress in this field, making these new chips from the company gradually a popular commodity.
AMD Corporation stated that its own chips are capable of training and running large-scale artificial intelligence models. The company had previously predicted that its revenue from artificial intelligence chips would reach $4 billion this year.
Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft Cloud and Artificial Intelligence Group, described the MI300X as "the most cost-effective GPU in Azure OpenAI services currently available.".
Cobalt 100 chip
In addition, according to reports, Microsoft is expected to launch its self-developed Cobalt 100 chip to Azure customers at the Build Developer Conference, in a publicly previewed version for customers to try.
The Cobalt chip was first released in November last year and is claimed to be a 64 bit processor with 128 cores. Based on Arm technology, it has been optimized for general-purpose workloads and features low power consumption and high efficiency.
In an analyst briefing before the Build conference, Vice President Scott Guthrie compared Cobalt chips with Amazon AWS's Graviton chips, which have been serving developers for several years.
Guthrie stated that the performance of the Cobalt 100 processor is 40% higher than other ARM based chips on the market, and referred to Cobalt as the "Microsoft version" of the Graviton chip.