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Just to shed some more light on the Intel 18A x Microsoft partnership for a chip, @thurrott: it cannot be Maia 100 nor Cobalt 100, as Microsoft directly confirmed both are built at TSMC.
Both chips are being produced on “the latest process node” at TSMC, Microsoft told Tom’s Hardware.
#1 Intel 18A won’t be shipping to customers until 2025, actually. Intel confirmed the 2025 date again at this week’s event: “Company leaders expect Intel will regain process leadership with Intel 18A in 2025.” The 2024 date is 18A readiness, not 18A high-volume manufacturing.
#2 Microsoft directly confirmed that Maia 100 is built on a 5nm-class process node, which Intel doesn’t produce.
Maia 100 is the first generation in the series, with 105 billion transistors, making it one of the largest chips on 5nm process technology
#3 Maia 100 is only an AI accelerator (ASIC, says Mary Jo Foley), not a CPU, so the main silicon is not Arm. It might have a few Arm cores, but it’d be unlikely.
#4 Cobalt 100 uses Arm’s Neoverse CSS (not plain Neoverse), specifically the N2 generation. Neoverse CSS are “ready-to-ship” silicon and the N2 generation is from 2021, so it’d need to use mature nodes.
#5 Cobalt 100 is currently in production internally at Azure, so it would need an already-shipping node.
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So what is Microsoft’s chip fabbed on Intel 18A chip?
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Cobalt 200 or perhaps Maia 200? Arm has confirmed that Faraday will ship Neoverse CSS N3 on Intel 18A in early 2025, so Microsoft will follow that path.
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Some smaller silicon: a network co-processor, a dedicated NPU, a Surface x86 or Surface Arm chip, some minor silicon on Xbox (as I don’t think AMD will want its IP be fabbed at Intel…yet).
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Microsoft’s Xbox console problem is merely a question of marketing. If MS puts out a streaming device that throws all rendering duties up to Azure and calls it an Xbox, all they need to do is rev up the marketing engine to convince console gamers that they have the power of The Cloud (cue thunderclap) in their living room. Lets face it, console gamers are no longer hardcore gamers, that class of gamer has moved on to PC with the resurgence of PC gaming.
I’d wager the majority of console gamers wouldn’t notice any difference given that the netcode in most console multiplayer games is trash to begin with.