Microsoft reveals two new computer chips for its technology division at the Ignite conference in Seattle on Wednesday. The first chip, Maia 100, is designed to compete with Nvidia’s leading AI graphics processing units, while the second chip, Cobalt 100 Arm, is targeted at general computing tasks and could be a competitor for Intel processors.
With a significant amount of cash on hand, other technology companies such as Alibaba, Amazon and Google, have been providing more options for cloud infrastructure to clients in order to run applications. Microsoft holds around a 21.5% share of the cloud market and has plans to release virtual-machine instances running on the Cobalt chips on its Azure cloud 2024.
Google, which introduced its tensor processing unit for AI in 2016, and Amazon Web Services with its Arm-based Graviton chips, bring significant competition to Microsoft in the cloud computing space. However, Microsoft and its counterparts are not intending for companies to purchase servers containing their chips, unlike Nvidia or AMD.
Borkar, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, revealed that Maia 100 has been developed based on customer feedback and is currently being tested for usage in various Microsoft applications. These include the Bing search engine’s AI chatbot, the GitHub Copilot coding assistant, and the GPT-3.5-Turbo language model from the Microsoft-affiliated OpenAI. In addition to the chip, Microsoft has also created liquid-cooled hardware, called Sidekicks, to supplement the Maia servers.
While Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 present promising opportunities for Microsoft, it remains to be seen how they will compare to existing rivals in the market, particularly in light of changing demand and performance benchmarks. The company is no doubt establishing itself as a strong contender and disruptor in the tech sector.