Microsoft re-entered the arena of producing chips of its own design after announcing the Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 chips during the Ignite event this morning. The Maia 100 artificial intelligence (AI) chip is designed for Azure systems with it being tested for Bing and AI requirements in Office software. OpenAI also tested Maia 100 for their GPT-3 Turbo requirements.
At the initial stage Maia 100 will be used on services offered by Microsoft before also being offered to their other customers. Microsoft did not disclose the full specifications of the Maia 100 except that it uses 5nm TSCM technology and is equipped with 105 billion transistors.
Meanwhile, the Cobalt 100 chip is the chip for the first browser designed by Microsoft. It uses ARM architecture and contains 128 CPU cores. It is designed specifically for cloud services through the Azure platform.
Like the Maia 100, the Cobalt 100 is also manufactured by TSMC but information about the architecture used has not been disclosed. It is currently being tested to run Microsoft Teams SQL browser with plans to offer it as a VM to customers.
Both chips will begin to be used on a large scale starting in 2024 as it is seen as a way for Microsoft to reduce its dependence on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel for its future computing needs and reduce operating costs.