Microsoft announced some "serious" developments around its AI compute portfolio at the recent "Ignite" event, revealing NVIDIA's Blackwell integration with Azure and new AMD EPYC "Genoa" chips with custom HBM memory.
It won't be wrong to say that Microsoft is a front-runner when bringing AI-oriented services to the public, given that the firm's vast AI computing arsenal allows it to have an "exclusive" position in the markets. At the recent Microsoft Ignite event, the firm revealed the utilization of NVIDIA's Blackwell AI products for the Azure platform, notably with the latest Azure ND GB200 V6 VM series, which is the first virtual machine by the company based on Blackwell.
Diving a bit more into technicals, the Azure ND GB200 V6 virtual machine reportedly features two GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips, with each of them being equipped with two high-performance Blackwell GPUs and a Grace CPU, interlinked using Team Green's NVLink interface. Interestingly, with multiple NVLink trays onboard, Microsoft can manage to provide up to 18 compute servers, ultimately providing 72 of NVIDIA's Blackwell GPUs over a single platform. Scaling isn't an issue with the newest VMs, credited to Team Green's InfiniBand fabric system.
The Azure ND GB200 V6 VMs are currently in their private preview stages with selected partners, and Microsoft plans to roll out the platform for a wider audience soon. Apart from this, Microsoft also announced a "CPU-based" virtual machine on the Azure platform, called the Azure HBv5, which specifically targets memory bandwidth-intensive HPC applications.
To obtain the best workload and cost-efficiency ratios, Microsoft decided to team up with AMD, utilizing their 4th Gen EPYC server CPUs. Here are the detailed specifications:
Microsoft has also revealed that they have managed to upscale the performance of their newest Azure HBv5 VM by up to 20 times from previous-gen counterparts.
This indeed shows the dominance of AMD's EPYC platform in the markets, which has already managed to outsell Intel as well. Overall, Microsoft's AI portfolio is undoubtedly planning to be one of the best ones out there, allowing the firm to capitalize on the AI hype to its fullest.