Microsoft has made its new custom Azure Cobalt 100-based virtual machines (VMs) generally available.
Launched on October 16, the VMs run on Microsoft's first 64-bit Arm-based Azure Cobalt 100 CPU which was designed in-house and first announced in November 2023.
The Cobalt 100-based VMs are available as the general-purpose Dpsv6-series and Dplsv6-series and the memory-optimized Epsv6-series VM series. According to Microsoft, they offer up to a 50 percent better price performance than its prior Arm-based VMs.
The general-purpose Dpsv6-series and Dplsv6-series 96 vCPUs and 384 GiB of RAM, while the memory-optimized offerings have up to 96 vCPUs and 672 GiB of RAM.
The VMs are designed to handle a variety of workloads, and offer up to a 1.4x improved CPU performance compared to previous Arm-based VMs, up to 1.5x performance on Java-based workloads, and up to 2x performance on web servers.
The VMs are available in the Canada Central, Central US, East US 2, East US, Germany West Central, Japan East, Mexico Central, North Europe, Southeast Asia, Sweden Central, Switzerland North, UAE North, West Europe, and West US 2 regions.
According to Microsoft, they will also be available in Australia East, Brazil South, France Central, India Central, South Central US, UK South, West US 3, and West US later in 2024.
Early adopters of the VMs include Cadence, Databricks, Elastic, Resecale, Siemens EDA, Snowflake, Synopsys, and Templafy.
Gabe Bryant, senior manager at Snowflake, said: "We have extensively tested Azure’s new Cobalt 100 VMs and compared them to the previous generation Arm VMs on Azure using Snowflake workloads. We’re thrilled with the significant improvements in performance. And now, we’re excited to adopt these latest Cobalt 100 VMs and share that performance improvement with our customers!”
“The Cobalt 100 processor is a fantastic example of how Arm-based silicon, supported by a robust software ecosystem, is addressing the growing compute complexity of modern infrastructure,” said Mohamed Awad, SVP and GM of Infrastructure Business, Arm.
“Following years of collaboration with Microsoft to bring Arm-based VMs to market, the general availability of Cobalt 100 marks an important milestone in our partnership, and demonstrates the power, efficiency, and flexibility of Arm Compute Subsystems in driving the workloads of the future.”
Earlier this month, Google made its custom Arm-based Axion CPUs available via its C4A virtual machines.
