We’re living in a generation of compute that is being defined by AI – a transformation that is happening at a pace unlike anything we’ve seen before. Arm remains on the critical path to enabling this AI-accelerated future in a sustainable and scalable way, providing new engineering innovation and developments to make it happen. It’s clear to me that this vision is shared across our ecosystem, including at this week’s Microsoft Ignite event.
Across the many AI advancements announced by Microsoft, it’s evident they are on the path to building a sustainable, scalable, and secure platform for AI and that they’re dedicated to changing the way developers build, deploy, and scale their applications in the cloud. Arm’s collaboration with Microsoft on Azure Cobalt 100 has already shifted the landscape of cloud data centers and the services offered by Microsoft in just one year since its launch in 2023. By leveraging the flexibility and power-efficiency of Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS), Microsoft is pushing the boundaries of compute with Cobalt 100, establishing a capable and flexible infrastructure supporting a wide variety of mission critical modern applications — from media servers and open-source databases to CI/CD pipelines.
AI has not only opened the world’s eyes to the power challenge in the datacenter, but it has unlocked a greater emphasis on the need for more specialized silicon. Every watt counts, and for change-makers like Microsoft, this means taking greater control over the entire infrastructure stack from silicon to cloud service deployment with sustainability in focus.
As mentioned in the Microsoft keynote, 100% of Microsoft Teams’ media processing capabilities now run on Cobalt 100, which is a testament to purpose-built compute delivering the required performance as efficiently as possible. This is the mission that Neoverse CSS was built for. Through tailored solutions like Cobalt 100, Microsoft is setting the stage for a future-ready cloud, capable of handling the growing demands of AI-enabled workloads without pushing energy consumption to unsustainable levels. To dig in on the impressive performance gains delivered by Cobalt 100-powered VMs to date, I encourage you to check out this week’s Arm Viewpoints podcast with Arpita Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager for Azure Platforms. And if you happen to tune into the Microsoft Ignite digital event, check out Arm’s virtual booth.
In addition to the impressive Cobalt 100 momentum to date, Microsoft announced they will be the first cloud vendor to make instances based on Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell platform available. Consisting of 72 Arm Neoverse V2 cores connected through a high-bandwidth coherent link to Nvidia’s latest Blackwell accelerator, Grace Blackwell is a great example of the kind of specialized silicon the Arm platform enables our partners to build, in this case targeting the most demanding AI training and inference workloads.
The groundwork for an AI-powered future
Arm’s longstanding partnership with Microsoft has been instrumental in our mission to enable a modern AI-enabled data center with specialized silicon, but silicon is not the limit of our work together. We’re partnering to make it as easy as possible for developers to transition their workloads to optimized, Arm-based platforms. With tools like the Arm Software Ecosystem Dashboard and a robust library of Azure-specific tutorials and resources, developers are getting access to a comprehensive view of software packages supported on Arm and hands-on instructions to seamlessly migrate and run their applications on Arm-based Microsoft Azure instances. One example I’m particularly excited about is the new Arm extensions for GitHub Copilot which will offer specialized tools for AI and standard code development, such as code migration, containerization, CI/CD workflows, and performance optimization. We’ll be releasing it in the Github marketplace this year, so watch this space for more updates on availability!
Cobalt 100 is only one example of a movement toward Arm-based purpose-built computing solutions that is happening across the broader data center landscape. The Arm architecture is becoming the foundation for specialized silicon needed to achieve the performance and efficiency required to succeed in the AI era. Alongside decades of investment in a robust software ecosystem to help developers bring their AI innovations to life, this is the groundwork for an AI-powered future that brings innovative advances in sciences, commerce, productivity and more.
The post Igniting a New Era of Cloud Computing for AI appeared first on Arm Newsroom.
Login
