Microsoft will introduce Cobalt 100 chips for customers as a public preview during the upcoming Build conference week.
During the press conference before Build, Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Artificial Intelligence at Cobalt, compared Microsoft’s chips to Amazon’s Graviton chips that were launched for developers several years ago.
Guthrie emphasized that Microsoft’s chips outperform other ARM chips in the market by 40 percent, and companies like Adobe, Snowflake, and others have started using them.
Microsoft first announced the launch of Cobalt chips in November last year. These chips are based on Arm technology and feature 128 cores.
In addition to Cobalt chips, Microsoft also offers AMD MI300X accelerators for Azure customers next week.
AMD is considered one of the leading companies in manufacturing graphic processing units, and despite being significantly behind Nvidia in the field of artificial intelligence for a long time, AMD has started gaining reputation in this area by providing better software support. As a result, these new chips have also become popular now.
Guthrie described the graphics processing unit as cost-effective and currently available through Azure OpenAI.
Microsoft plans to reduce its prices to make large language models more accessible and will showcase them at Build next week.
Microsoft is also starting to use a new artificial intelligence system that enables real-time data access through Fabric, a Microsoft data analysis system.
This software integrates with the original Kafka system and also supports AWS Kinesis service and data access systems like Pub/Sub in Google Cloud.
Microsoft is set to announce a partnership with Snowflake, and Fabric now supports Snowflake’s Iceberg format. This collaboration enables seamless compatibility with Snowflake, allowing any data stored in Snowflake to appear in Fabric and vice versa.
Microsoft plans to launch a new feature that allows developers to manage Azure resources using natural language via Copilot.
