A new Maia 100 AI chip able to compete with Nvidia products presented by Microsoft

Recently Microsoft has presented two new chip solutions for their cloud infrastructure – an AI chip Maia 100 as well as a general-purpose Arm-based Cobalt 100.

The AI accelerator of Azure Maia 100 is fabricated on the 5nm process with 105 billion transistors. The chip is designed for various workloads related to AI.

Currently, Microsoft is testing the chip on the Bing search engine assistant.

As for Azure Cobalt, it’s a 128-core general-purpose chip. Besides performance, energy efficiency was also given a lot of attention during the development of this model. The primary tests of the chip show a 40% higher performance than analogous Arm-solutions.