AMD and Microsoft showcased AMD products at Microsoft Ignite, including AMD Instinct™ MI300X accelerator, EPYC™ CPUs, and Ryzen™ CPUs with AI engines, enabling new services and compute capabilities in cloud and generative AI, Confidential Computing, and Cloud Computing.

“AMD is fostering AI everywhere — from the cloud, to the enterprise and end points devices — all powered by our CPUs, GPUs, accelerators and AI engines,” AMD AI Senior Vice President Vamsi Boppana said.

“Together with Microsft and a rapidly growing ecosystem of software and hardware partners, AMD is accelerating innovation to bring benefits of AI to a broad portfolio of compute engines, with expanding software capabilities.”

The AMD Instinct MI300X is featured in Microsoft’s new Azure ND MI300x v5 Virtual Machine (VM) series optimised for AI workloads, making Azure the first cloud to deploy the new accelerator. The new virtual machines are part of Microsoft’s diversified infrastructure, which supports AI innovation for organisations worldwide, giving customers more options for efficiency and scalability.

Meanwhile, 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors are currently being used to power a new generation of general-purpose, memory-intensive, and compute-optimised virtual machines. These new Microsoft VMs demonstrate the continued growth and demand for AMD EPYC processors in the cloud, with better price options, up to 20% better performance for general-purpose and memory-intensive VMs, and up to 2x the CPU performance for compute-optimised VMs compared to the previous generation of AMD EPYC-powered VMs. In the first quarter of 2024, the new VM series will be ready for public preview.

AMD has also introduced the Azure NGads V620 series of virtual machines (VMs) at Ignite, which are now available in general availability. These VMs are powered by AMD Radeon™ PRO V620 GPUs and 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs. They are designed for workloads requiring more GPU resources per VM, supporting more demanding workloads or more users per VM. The NGads V620 offers a great experience for gaming, VDI, and rendering.

Additionally, AMD showcased the success of Ryzen AI, the first dedicated AI accelerator on an x86 processor. With over 50 Ryzen 7000 Series processors with Ryzen AI built in, millions of AMD AI PCs are available. AMD and Microsoft have partnered to enable Windows Studio Effects on Ryzen AI PCs, and AMD continues to collaborate with software developers.