Microsoft Launches FPGA-Powered Machine Learning for Azure Customers

At the Microsoft Build conference on Monday, the company kicked off a new cloud offering that would provide machine learning resources to cloud customers using Intel FPGA-accelerated servers. "I think this is a first step in making the FPGAs more of a general-purpose platform for customers," said Mark Russinovich, chief technical officer for Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. The technology is being offered as "preview," which apparently means only a limited set of capabilities and allocations are available. Also, at this point, only customers with accounts in the East US 2 region will be able to access the platform. This represents the commercialization of Microsoft's Project Brainwave, an FPGA-based machine learning platform the company developed over the past year.