Microsoft has announced its Cobalt 100 processor designed under the ARM architecture to accelerate cloud-based workloads and artificial intelligence tasks.
Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100: New 128-core ARM SoC
The Azure Cobalt 100 CPU from Microsoft will offer a total of 128 cores, aligned with 64-bit Armv9 instructions.
Microsoft has provided limited details in this presentation, such as the core count, but comprehensive specifications of the SoC are not yet available. However, the company assures that the performance target is up to 40% compared to the current generation of ARM servers running on Azure’s cloud.
Microsoft’s SoC is utilizing the ARM Neoverse CSS platform, customized for this occasion. Although Microsoft has not explicitly mentioned it, the cores could be the ARM Neoverse N2.
The performance improvement of this SoC is expected to be up to 40% compared to the current generation of ARM servers running on Azure.
The chip is designed to power servers, especially those hosting OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and many other AI services.
Microsoft is introducing the Maia 100 AI accelerator, manufactured in TSMC’s 5nm process. It boasts 105 billion transistors and supports various MX data formats, including those below 8 bits. The MAIA 100 features an aggregated bandwidth of 4.8 Terabits per accelerator, using an Ethernet-based network protocol for scaling, a protocol also customized by Microsoft. This will facilitate the rapid adoption of Cobalt 100.
It is expected that Azure Cobalt 100 and Maia 100 AI accelerators will be implemented in Microsoft’s servers by next year.
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