With a systems approach to chips, Microsoft aims to tailor everything ‘from silicon to service’ to meet AI demand

17-November-2023, Source : https://news.microsoft.com/

Tucked away on Microsoft’s Redmond campus is a lab full of machines probing the basic building block of the digital age: Silicon. This multi-step process meticulously tests the silicon, in a method Microsoft engineers have been refining in secret for years.

Today at Microsoft Ignite the company unveiled two custom-designed chips and integrated systems that resulted from that journey: the Microsoft Azure Maia AI Accelerator, optimized for artificial intelligence (AI) tasks and generative AI, and the Microsoft Azure Cobalt CPU, an Arm-based processor tailored to run general purpose compute workloads on the Microsoft Cloud.

The chips represent a last puzzle piece for Microsoft to deliver infrastructure systems – which include everything from silicon choices, software and servers to racks and cooling systems – that have been designed from top to bottom and can be optimized with internal and customer workloads in mind.