Microsoft Azure's latest ND MI300X v5 VM is powered by AMD's MI300X GPU

Microsoft is making a ton of investments in its cloud computing platform, Azure. From integrating AI capabilities to introducing new VMs (Virtual Machines), every action right now is customer-centric. And the latest on the list is the Microsoft Azure ND MI300X v5 VM!

Powered by the AMD Instinct MI300X, the new VM delivers the best high bandwidth memory (HBM) capacity among all available options, according to Microsoft’s official blog. Its primary use case is to help organizations scale their AI efforts.

Microsoft tells us that the new Azure VMs are powered by 8x AMD MI300X GPUs. Individually, each VM delivers 1.5 TB of high bandwidth memory (HBM) and 5.3 TB/s of HBM bandwidth.

High HBM capacity and HBM bandwidth are ideal for AI applications, and help process scores of data in no time. And given the compact size, high bandwidth, and low power consumption, HBM becomes key to AI applications.

Besides, the Microsoft Azure ND MI300X v5 VM runs on the AMD ROCm open-source software platform, which comes with a wide array of built-in tools and libraries that facilitate seamless AI development and deployment.

For the end customer, it directly results in cost and time savings!

While highlighting the different aspects of the new Azure ND MI300X v5 VM, Jason Henderson, CVP of Office 365 Product Management at Microsoft, said,

These new Azure VMs based on AMD’s latest Instinct GPUs, MI300X, have delivered impressive performance results for our Microsoft Copilot Service. Microsoft’s heterogenous approach to silicon investments across AI accelerators ensures we are delivering continuous performance benefits to the thousands of Copilot customers, and we are excited to add the unprecedented power of these new VMs to our fleet. These VMs are part of the leading AI infrastructure platform that runs GPT-4 Turbo and underpins critical M365 Copilot scenarios, including M365 Copilot chat, Word Copilot, and Teams Meeting Copilot.

Microsoft also shared that Hugging Face was one of its first partners to switch to the Azure ND MI300X VMs and has since then reported 2-3 times performance gains.

The statement of Victor Peng, President of AMD, on the new VM, as available in AMD’s official press release, reads,

The AMD Instinct MI300X and ROCm software stack is powering the Azure OpenAI Chat GPT 3.5 and 4 services, which are some of the world’s most demanding AI workloads. With the general availability of the new VMs from Azure, AI customers have broader access to MI300X to deliver high-performance and efficient solutions for AI applications.

The availability of the new Microsoft Azure ND MI300X v5 VM is currently limited to Canada Central and Sweden Central. As per reports, this is due to central Canada having the most amount of computing capacity, given the presence of massive data centers.

Earlier, Microsoft announced VMs powered by the Azure Cobalt 100 processor in an effort to expand its offerings.

What are your thoughts on the latest Azure ND MI300X v5 VM? Share with our readers in the comments section.