The Azure Cobalt CPU, named after the blue pigment, is a 128-core chip that’s built on an Arm Neoverse CSS design and customized for Microsoft. It’s designed to power general cloud services on Azure. “We’ve put a lot of thought into not just getting it to be highly performant, but also making sure we’re mindful of power management,” explains Borkar. “We made some very intentional design choices, including the ability to control performance and power consumption per core and on every single virtual machine.”
