Microsoft will preview its new Cobalt 100 processors to the public at its upcoming Build conference.
Next week, at its Build conference, Microsoft will provide a public preview of its specially designed Cobalt 100 processors to consumers.
At an analyst conference in advance of Build, Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft Cloud and AI business, specifically compared Cobalt to AWS’s Graviton chips, which developers have been able to use for a number of years. According to Guthrie, Microsoft’s chips would perform 40% better than competing ARM CPUs. Adobe, Snowflake, and other companies are already using the new chips.
In November of last year, Microsoft initially revealed its cobalt chips. These 64-bit devices have 128 cores and are based on the Arm architecture.
Next week, Azure clients will be able to access AMD’s MI300X accelerators in addition to the Cobalt chips from Microsoft. Even though AMD is a well-known GPU manufacturer, it has long lagged behind Nvidia in the AI market.
However, as major cloud providers search for cheaper options to Nvidia’s costly chips, AMD has begun to close the gap by providing superior software support, and these new chips are quickly becoming in demand.
It is the “most cost-effective GPU out there right now for Azure OpenAI,” according to Guthrie.
We also discovered that Microsoft will be offering huge language model access and running it at a reduced price starting next week at Build. But it’s unclear exactly how that will appear at this point.
Additionally, they will make a new “real-time intelligence system” available for preview, enabling real-time data streaming into Microsoft’s data analytics system, Fabric. Together with support for Google Cloud’s Pub/Sub data-streaming technology and AWS Kinesis, this system will provide native Kafka integration.
Additionally, Microsoft will declare its collaboration with Snowflake. In addition to Databricks’ Parquet format, Fabric will now support Snowflake’s Iceberg format, allowing for “seamless interoperability with Snowflake and enabling any data that’s in Snowflake to show up in Fabric and vice versa.”
For those of you who adore Copilot, Microsoft intends to release a new feature that will let developers use natural language to control their Azure resources straight from Copilot.
That will make it possible for your development stack and Azure to have even tighter developer loops with natural language, according to Guthrie. To provide comparable features, other suppliers may plug into the system, which is based on a standard extensibility method.