As part of the Ignite conference, Microsoft announced the dedicated central processor Cobalt 100, as well as the dedicated computing accelerator Maia 100. Both innovations are designed to speed up the operation of cloud systems as well as AI-related tasks.

Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 is a 128-core processor with a 64-bit Armv9 instruction set designed for use in cloud servers. Microsoft did not provide technical details about the chip. However, the company said Cobalt 100’s performance is up to 40% higher than Arm-based solutions currently used in Microsoft Azure server systems. The processors use the Arm Neoverse CSS platform adapted for Microsoft and likely have Arm Neoverse N2 cores.

Microsoft is actively implementing various artificial intelligence technologies (ChatGPT from OpenAI and its own Copilot) in many of its services and products, so the company needs stable access to dedicated server computing accelerators for relevant tasks. For this, the company developed Athena accelerators with the support of AMD. As a result, Microsoft changed its name to Maia 100. The graphics chips in these accelerators contain 105 billion transistors and will be manufactured using TSMC’s 5 nm technology. Microsoft says the Maia 100 is one of the largest chips produced using this process.

Microsoft is currently testing Maia 100 with the GPT-3.5 Turbo language model. The company claims that Maia 100 delivers a total throughput of 4.8 Tbps per accelerator. An Ethernet-based interconnect is used to connect these accelerators as part of Microsoft servers.

Microsoft uses liquid cooling systems to cool the Maia 100. Since Microsoft does not currently have more ergonomic solutions that can fit directly into the server, the company relies on auxiliary external cooling units that work on the SHO principle for home computers that are not maintained, only significantly increased in size. Coolant from the outdoor unit (heatsink) is piped to the contact plates mounted on the Maia 100 chips, then the liquid returns to the external auxiliary cooling system to remove heat.

The manufacturer will begin using Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 custom processors and Microsoft Azure Maia 100 AI accelerators in its server systems starting early next year. Microsoft will also continue to provide Azure cloud services based on NVIDIA and AMD solutions.