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Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. <\/p>\n
In an analyst briefing ahead of Build, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft\u2019s executive VP of the Microsoft Cloud and AI group, directly compared Cobalt to AWS\u2019s Graviton chips, which have been available to developers for quite a few years now. Guthrie said that Microsoft\u2019s chips will offer 40% better performance over other ARM chips in the market. Adobe, Snowflake and others have already started using the new chips. <\/p>\n
Microsoft first announced its Cobalt chips last November<\/a>. These 64-bit chips are based on the Arm architecture and feature 128 cores. <\/p>\n In addition to the Cobalt chips, Microsoft will also make AMD\u2019s MI300X accelerators available to Azure clients next week. Despite being a major GPU manufacturer, AMD has long trailed Nvidia in the AI space, but as the large cloud providers look to find alternatives to Nvidia\u2019s expensive chips \u2014 and as AMD has started to gain some ground in this space by offering better software support \u2014 these new chips are now a hot commodity as well.<\/p>\n Guthrie described it as the \u201cmost cost-effective GPU out there right now for Azure OpenAI.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the other nuggets of news we learned is that Microsoft will drop its pricing for accessing and running large language models at Build next week. What exactly that will look like remains unclear, though. <\/p>\n Microsoft will also go into preview with a new \u201creal-time intelligence system\u201d that will allow real-time data streaming into Fabric, Microsoft\u2019s data analytics system. This system will offer a native Kafka integration as well as support for AWS Kinesis and Google Cloud\u2019s Pub\/Sub<\/a> data-streaming systems.<\/p>\n Microsoft will also announce a partnership with Snowflake. Fabric will now support Snowflake\u2019s Iceberg format (in addition to Databricks\u2019 Parquet), which will enable \u201cseamless interoperability with Snowflake and enable any data that\u2019s in Snowflake to show up in Fabric and vice versa.\u201d<\/p>\n And for you Copilot fans: Microsoft plans to launch a new feature that will allow developers to manage their Azure resources directly from Copilot, using natural language. \u201cThat\u2019s going to enable an even tighter developer loop with natural language across your development stack and Azure,\u201d Guthrie said. That system is built on top of a common extensibility mechanism, so other providers will be able to plug into it as well and offer similar capabilities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n