Microsoft has announced its first AI custom chip, namely Maia 100. This tech giant announced this at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Seattle. Along with the Maia 100, it has also announced an Arm chip called the Cobalt. With these chips, Microsoft aims to compete directly with Nvidia, Google, Amazon, and Intel as well.
Currently, the Maia 100 is not ready to go public. Microsoft is testing the AI chip for its performance in various applications. This includes the GitHub Copilot coding assistant, the GPT-3.5-Turbo language model from OpenAI and Microsoft, and the Bing search engine (Copilot now). Microsoft is planning to offer more options within its Azure cloud infrastructure with the new Maia 100 AI chip. This will help the users run more and various applications.
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Not much has been disclosed about Microsoft’s first AI chip yet. I guess we are going to have a little more patience to get to know about the Maia 100 thoroughly. The brand has not even revealed when it will be available for common users.
The Maia 100 is expected to meet the huge demand for cloud infrastructure to accelerate AI workload. Microsoft being a rich and providing company, has invested in developing these chips based on customer feedback.
Microsoft has also announced the Cobalt 100 Arm Chip along with the Maia AI chip. Now this chip works very differently. The Cobalt 100 Arm chip is more declined towards cloud computing operations. This chip will be used to run various computing applications with its ability to handle different types of tasks effectively.
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CNBC reported that a vice president at Microsoft, Rani Borkar, said that these virtual-machine instances that run on the Cobalt chips could be released commercially in 2024 via Microsoft’s Azure cloud. She further revealed that when compared to Azure’s existing Arm-based chips, the new ones showed a 40% improvement when test runs of the Teams app and Azure SQL Database service were made on it. Looking at this, in the future the Cobalt 100 could be seen as a potential choice when organizations look for efficient and versatile options in the Azure Cloud system
Both the chips tend to work differently. While the Maia 100 has been developed to do the AI-based work, the Cobalt 100 is supposed to do the computing jobs. However, the brand has made it very clear that it won’t sell the new chips, instead it will use them to power up its own Azure cloud.
