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On the Ignite developer convention right this moment, Microsoft unveiled two new chips designed for its knowledge middle infrastructure: the Azure Built-in HSM and the Azure Enhance DPU.
Scheduled for launch within the coming months, these custom-designed chips purpose to deal with safety and effectivity gaps confronted in present knowledge facilities, additional optimizing their servers for large-scale AI workloads. The announcement follows the launch of Microsoft’s Maia AI accelerators and Cobalt CPUs, marking one other main step within the firm’s complete technique to rethink and optimize each layer of its stack— from silicon to software program—to help superior AI.
The Satya Nadella-led firm additionally detailed new approaches aimed toward managing energy utilization and warmth emissions of information facilities, as many proceed to boost alarms over the environmental influence of information facilities operating AI.
Only recently, Goldman Sachs printed analysis estimating that superior AI workloads are poised to drive a 160% enhance in knowledge middle energy demand by 2030, with these services consuming 3-4% of world energy by the top of the last decade.
The brand new chips
Whereas persevering with to make use of industry-leading {hardware} from firms like Nvidia and AMD, Microsoft has been pushing the bar with its {custom} chips.
Final yr at Ignite, the corporate made headlines with Azure Maia AI accelerator, optimized for synthetic intelligence duties and generative AI, in addition to Azure Cobalt CPU, an Arm-based processor tailor-made to run general-purpose compute workloads on the Microsoft Cloud.
Now, as the subsequent step on this journey, it has expanded its {custom} silicon portfolio with a selected deal with safety and effectivity.
The brand new in-house safety chip, Azure Built-in HSM, comes with a devoted {hardware} safety module, designed to fulfill FIPS 140-3 Stage 3 safety requirements.
In keeping with Omar Khan, the vice chairman for Azure Infrastructure advertising, the module basically hardens key administration to verify encryption and signing keys keep safe throughout the bounds of the chip, with out compromising efficiency or rising latency.
To attain this, Azure Built-in HSM leverages specialised {hardware} cryptographic accelerators that allow safe, high-performance cryptographic operations immediately throughout the chip’s bodily remoted surroundings. In contrast to conventional HSM architectures that require community round-trips or key extraction, the chip performs encryption, decryption, signing, and verification operations fully inside its devoted {hardware} boundary.
Whereas Built-in HSM paves the best way for enhanced knowledge safety, Azure Enhance DPU (knowledge processing unit) optimizes knowledge facilities for extremely multiplexed knowledge streams akin to hundreds of thousands of community connections, with a deal with energy effectivity.
The providing, first within the class from Microsoft, enhances CPUs and GPUs by absorbing a number of parts of a standard server right into a single piece of silicon — proper from high-speed Ethernet and PCIe interfaces to community and storage engines, knowledge accelerators and safety features.
It really works with a classy hardware-software co-design, the place a {custom}, light-weight data-flow working system permits greater efficiency, decrease energy consumption and enhanced effectivity in comparison with conventional implementations.
Microsoft expects the chip will simply run cloud storage workloads at 3 times much less energy and 4 occasions the efficiency in comparison with present CPU-based servers.
New approaches to cooling, energy optimization
Along with the brand new chips, Microsoft additionally shared developments made in direction of bettering knowledge middle cooling and optimizing their energy consumption.
For cooling, the corporate introduced a complicated model of its warmth exchanger unit – a liquid cooling ‘sidekick’ rack. It didn’t share the precise beneficial properties promised by the tech however famous that it may be retrofitted into Azure knowledge facilities to handle warmth emissions from large-scale AI techniques utilizing AI accelerators and power-hungry GPUs similar to these from Nvidia.
On the power administration entrance, the corporate stated it has collaborated with Meta on a brand new disaggregated energy rack, aimed toward enhancing flexibility and scalability.
“Each disaggregated power rack will feature 400-volt DC power that enables up to 35% more AI accelerators in each server rack, enabling dynamic power adjustments to meet the different demands of AI workloads,” Khan wrote within the weblog.
Microsoft is open-sourcing the cooling and energy rack specs for the {industry} by means of the Open Compute Undertaking. As for the brand new chips, the corporate stated it plans to put in Azure Built-in HSMs in each new knowledge middle server beginning subsequent yr. The timeline for the DPU roll-out, nonetheless, stays unclear at this stage.
Microsoft Ignite runs from November 19-22, 2024
