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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

This sounds a bit like a basic version of AWS' Nitro - specialised chips that deal with the storage, networking, etc. leaving only the actual customer workloads on the actual CPUs. If Microsoft are buying to add this to Azure, that would indicate they're pretty behind AWS on that front (among many others).

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Microsoft have had similar for years. Last I heard it was an FPGA with some ARM cores attached, with the former offloading networking and storage, and the latter running various services that the Azure backend talks to, on a custom Linux distribution. The main processors are all still x86 though, typically running Windows Server to host whatever VMs have been provisioned.

Are there any public talks or papers you’re aware of on this?

AWS (rightly) make a lot of noise about Nitro and the benefits of their architecture - I’d expect anyone who is actually in a similar position to be doing the same.

They've released some information on this under the name "Project Catapult":

https://www.microsoft.com/research/project/project-catapult

Project Overlake is the current iteration

You should check out www.nebulon.com

They are doing an AWS Nitro system for everyone else

You'd have to look back, but I think AWS was ahead of many folks in doing this, but surely aren't alone. Today Intel, AMD and Nvidia all offer "DPUs" which is the generic name for what AWS Nitro does. And as others mention Azure has been doing it in FPGAs, so similar idea, just a bit slower and more expensive. AWS seems to own more of the lower levels of the stack than Microsoft. Right or wrong I can't say. If you do it better than off the shelf, and cheaper, then it's a win of course. Screw up and that's another story.

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