During its annual Build 2024 conference, Microsoft announced the availability in preview of new instances of Azure virtual machines equipped with its own Cobalt 100 processor.
Announced last November on the occasion of its conference Fire in 2023, the Cobalt 100 is the first processor developed internally by Microsoft. Based on ARM architecture and optimized specifically for the Azure cloud, this processor promises significant gains in performance and energy efficiency for generic and cloud-native workloads.
Microsoft is announcing a 40% performance increase compared to the previous generation of ARM VMs on Azure (based on Ampere processors), or even doubling on certain workloads such as web servers, .NET or in-memory databases. Local storage also benefits from quadruple IOPS thanks to NVMe Direc support and up to 1.5x network bandwidth compared to the previous generation of Azure Arm VMs.
“ Azure Cobalt 100 VM can deliver up to 1.4x CPU performance, up to 1.5x performance for Java workloads and up to 2x performance for web servers, .NET applications and in-memory cache applications, compared to the previous generation Azure ARM VM- this » explains Microsoft.
The first three offers are available in the preview:
* New series Dpsv6 offers up to 96 vCPUs with 384 GiB RAM (4:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio).
* New series Dplsv6 offers up to 96 vCPUs with 192 GiB RAM (memory-vCPU ratio 2:1).
* New series Epsv6 offers up to 96 vCPUs with up to 672 GiB RAM (up to 8:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio) for memory-intensive workloads.
During the Ignite conference, Microsoft suggested that its processor has 128 cores. The limitation of the first offerings to 96 cores suggests either that the initial information was false or that Microsoft has several different versions of the Cobalt 100, including one with 96 cores. Unless the publisher systematically reserves 32 cores on these machines for internal monitoring, cyber security, network management and virtualization purposes.
” The new Dplsv6 and Dpldsv6 VMs are ideal for media encoding, small databases, game servers, microservices, and all workloads that don’t require more RAM per vCPU » explains Microsoft.
Before adding: ” Memory-optimized Epsv6 and Epdsv6 VMs have more memory per vCPU to meet the demands of large databases, in-memory cache applications, and data analytics workloads. »
These “Cobalt 100” VMs support numerous Linux distributions starting from Canonical Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, Alma Linux, Azure Linux (via AKS), Flatcar Linux.
But Windows developers can also install a preview version of Windows 11 24H2, one optimized for Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors with Intel’s emulation layer. Prism Engine “.
Microsoft reminds that major languages such as .NET, Java or C++ are optimized to take advantage of the Arm architecture.
Early adopters of Cobalt 100 on Azure, such as Snowflake, MongoDB or Elastic, are delighted. They see it as a very competitive option in terms of performance to price ratio for their large databases and applications.
Microsoft states that the use of these Cobalt 100-based VMs will be free during the testing phase, while the other Azure resources consumed by these VMs will remain chargeable.
On the other hand, Microsoft still hasn’t revealed the availability of its second internal processor in Azure, Maia 100 chip. On the other hand, the cloud provider announced that next week it will offer AMD’s new MI300X GPU accelerators, presented as currently the most cost-effective on Azure for generative AI and machine learning.
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