Microsoft Corp. will use Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s upcoming Helios rack design to power some Azure services.
The cloud and operating system giant announced the partnership today alongside three new instance families.
Helios is a reference design, a blueprint that AMD’s manufacturing partners can use to make data center racks. Each system contains 72 of the chipmaker’s upcoming Instinct MI455 graphics processing units. AMD has to date shared only a few details about the GPU. It will feature 432 gigabytes of HBM4 memory, 19.6 terabits per second of bandwidth and a new core architecture called CDNA 5.
Helios’ GPUs are supported by Pensando data processing units and Epyc central processing units.
Pensando chips are optimized for infrastructure management tasks such as coordinating storage equipment and encrypting network traffic. According to AMD, they can run such workloads more efficiently than CPUs. That lowers costs while making more CPU capacity available for customer applications.
The CPUs in Helios are from AMD’s upcoming Venice data center processor series. In May, the company started ramping up production of the chips using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s two-nanometer process. The Venice series also uses a second TSMC technology called SoIC that makes it possible to stack chiplets atop one another.
Helios organizes its CPUs, GPUs and DPUs in modules called trays. The trays are wider than a standard rack server to accommodate more hardware. They use liquid cooling to dissipate heat from their chips and exchange data using an open-source network protocol called UALoE.
“AMD and Microsoft have spent years building high-performance infrastructure together, and today we’re extending that partnership across the full stack of AMD AI solutions on Azure,” said AMD Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su.
AMD will start shipping Helios racks to Microsoft and other customers later this year. The tech giant will use the systems to power a new family of Azure instances called the ND MI455X v7 series. According to Microsoft, the virtual machines are optimized for inference workloads such as artificial intelligence agents and search tools.
The company debuted the ND MI455X v7 series alongside two other instance families that will also run on AMD silicon.
The HDv2 series is optimized for tasks that AI applications carry out using CPUs rather than CPUs. That includes the process of preparing datasets for analysis by AI agents. Each instance includes up to 500 Epyc Vulcan cores, four terabytes of memory and 32 terabytes of flash storage.
