Microsoft announces preview of Project Brainwave bringing the power of FPGAs to Azure

At Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced the preview of Project Brainwave bringing the power of FPGAs to the Azure cloud customers. In addition, Microsoft also announced that they are bringing Project Brainwave to the edge. This project makes Azure the fastest cloud to run real-time AI and is now fully integrated with Azure Machine Learning. It also supports Intel FPGA hardware and ResNet50-based neural networks.

“With today’s announcement, customers can now utilize Intel’s FPGA and Intel Xeon technologies to use Microsoft’s stream of AI breakthroughs on both the cloud and the edge,” said Doug Burger, distinguished engineer, Microsoft Corp. “These new capabilities will allow the integration of AI into real-time processes to transform businesses with the power of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft AI.”

Mark Russinovich, chief technical officer for Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, said the preview of Project Brainwave marks the start of Microsoft’s efforts to bring the power of FPGAs to customers for a variety of purposes.

A limited preview of Project Brainwave is now available. Learn more about this announcement here.