Microsoft Tips Project Volterra Arm Hardware for Hybrid AI Development
At Microsoft Build 2022, the software giant’s annual developer conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled new ways programmers can take advantage of AI and hybrid computing, new tools to help them do so, and a new hardware box called Volterra for code development.
At the once-again online-only event kicked off with the Imagine Cup(Opens in a new window) student programming competition awards for young coders around the world. But the company also announced new ways to leverage its Teams collaboration platform and Windows 11 operating system. Of course, the metaverse got some play, too, as it’s perhaps the hottest topic in tech of late, but Microsoft focuses on its workplace use cases.
Project Volterra is a development platform based on Qualcomm Snapdragon that leverages a new Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK for Windows toolkit. Its use of this Arm processor points to Microsoft looking in a similar direction as Apple, though there was still plenty of evidence of Intel Silicon at the show, too.
For example, the availability of Azure DCsv3 virtual machines with Intel Software Guard Extensions was also announced. According to documentation provided to the press, these offer “app-level confidentiality through enclaves and Multi Key Total Memory Encryption (MK-TME), with up to 48 physical cores and a 12-times increase in memory.”
One buzzterm used by Nadella is the hybrid loop. A form of hybrid computing, it's a strategy for sharing processing—particularly machine learning processing—between cloud and local processing. It’s implemented by Microsoft’s Onnx Runtime and Azure ML engine and coded to use what the company calls its Prototype AI toolchain. The following diagram from Build illustrates the process:
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