In March, we showed that Project Olympus has attracted the latest in silicon innovation to address the exploding growth of cloud services. Project Olympus was based on a new hardware development model for community based open collaboration that we developed with the Open Compute Project. Microsoft is proud to announce the newest generation of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors for Project Olympus.
For the first years of Azure, Microsoft purchased standard x86 servers and off the shelf hardware from OEMs. As Azure grew, we began using custom hardware to deliver a high performance, scalable and flexible solutions for our 1st and 3rd party customers. Today, Azure innovates not just through services, but through our hardware infrastructure as well to support a wide range of traditional and emerging workloads.
Intel has been a premier platform partner for Project Olympus and the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor, code named Skylake, will be a cornerstone for this new platform. Azure has also worked closely with Intel to drive Intel Arria 10 FPGAs, which are deployed on every single Project Olympus server, to create a “Configurable Cloud” that can be reconfigured and optimized to support a diverse set of applications and functions.
We designed Project Olympus with the ability to accommodate a variety of workloads from email to databases, machine learning, and even AI. Some of these workloads have extremely demanding profiles for compute, storage networking, and IO. This requires a base platform that can scale with demands of current and emerging workloads. Intel Xeon Scalable Processors allow us to have a platform with the ability to scale resources as needed. Whether it’s more cores, memory bandwidth, IO, or the new Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) instructions, Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and Intel FPGAs provide a degree of flexibility and performance that allows us to meet the emerging demands of the cloud.
We hold steady with our intent for Project Olympus to provide a blueprint for future hardware development and collaboration. We also look forward to the continued collaboration with Intel in designing and building the highest performing, most flexible, and secure clouds possible.