Microsoft Azure Leverages AMD Tech for Powerful AI

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AMD and Microsoft Corp. today announced a strengthened partnership to deliver cutting-edge solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) and video services.

This collaboration leverages AMD’s high-performance computing technologies, including Instinct MI300X accelerators and Alveo MA35D media accelerators, alongside Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and AI software.

The partnership brings significant advancements in AI, with Microsoft Azure now utilizing AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators and ROCm open software to provide powerful and efficient AI solutions. This technology stack drives the Azure OpenAI Chat GPT 3.5 and 4 services, some of the world’s most demanding AI workloads.

Furthermore, the recently launched Microsoft Azure ND MI300X virtual machines empower customers with exceptional performance for tackling complex AI tasks. Hugging Face, a leading platform for AI models, is already leveraging these VMs to optimize their offerings.

For developers, AMD Ryzen AI software unlocks the potential of Ryzen AI powered PCs for optimized AI inference. This software enables applications to run on dedicated AI processing units within these machines, freeing up valuable CPU and GPU resources for other tasks and significantly enhancing battery life.

Microsoft has chosen AMD Alveo MA35D media accelerators to power its extensive live streaming video services, including Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. The Alveo MA35D is specifically designed for high-scale live interactive streaming, ensuring exceptional video quality by streamlining processing tasks like transcoding, decoding, and encoding. Additionally, this technology supports the latest AV1 compression standard and offers an upgrade path for future advancements.

AMD EPYC processors are at the heart of numerous Azure virtual machines, delivering improved performance and price-to-performance compared to the prior generation. These VMs cater to various needs, including general-purpose, memory-intensive, and compute-optimized workloads.

By joining forces, AMD and Microsoft are empowering users with advanced AI capabilities and superior video streaming experiences. This collaboration promises to propel innovation across various industries and applications.