Cloud Efficiency and Performance: Arm Neoverse-powered Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 VMs Now Available

Cloud users and developers are constantly seeking efficient and sustainable compute solutions that can scale for modern, cloud-native applications, including AI.  Microsoft, a leader in this space, has been addressing these needs through system-to-software optimization across their Azure offerings. Today, we’re thrilled to see Microsoft announce the general availability of new Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) powered by the Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS) N2-based Azure Cobalt 100 processor. This marks a significant milestone in our long-standing collaboration with Microsoft, offering a robust platform that delivers exceptional performance, scalability, and a thriving software ecosystem for diverse workloads.

Microsoft has played a key part in the adoption of Arm Neoverse, showcasing the price-performance and power efficiency gains of Arm-based platforms as an early adopter into their Microsoft Azure VM offerings. The availability of Azure Cobalt 100-powered VMs based on CSS N2 brings industry-leading price-performance compute instances to millions of users. Azure Cobalt 100 leverages the benefits delivered through the Neoverse CSS platform and a robust software ecosystem developing on Arm, allowing Microsoft more time to focus on adding unique innovation and optimization while saving significant development effort.

The new VMs outlined in this announcement blog from Microsoft include the Dpsv6 and Dplsv6 series general-purpose VMs and the Epsv6 memory-optimized VMs and are available in multiple regions. 

Arm Neoverse Software Ecosystem Advantage

Cloud developers are building their applications on Arm Neoverse platforms and benefiting from performance, efficiency, cost savings and sustainability gains. For developers, this is made possible by having a mature software ecosystem support across the software stack and strong open source and ISV enablement in place. 

The Arm software ecosystem has native support across all major Linux OS distributions, container runtimes and orchestration, languages and libraries, CI/CD and AI/ML frameworks. For example, cloud native developers can natively build, test and deploy their Linux and Windows based applications with GitHub Actions achieving 37% better cost efficiencies. The broad range of ISVs and open source projects including cloud workloads supported is listed on the Software Ecosystem Dashboard. 

Running cloud workloads on Cobalt 100 VMs such as web servers, Java-based applications, databases, HPC and EDA workloads provide significant price-performance benefits as showcased below:

High Performance Computing (HPC) Workloads on Azure Cobalt 100

With every major application and framework in the open-source HPC ecosystem and the leading commercial simulations from companies such as Altair, ANSYS and Siemens supporting Arm architecture, the Azure Cobalt 100 is ready to deploy HPC workloads. 

Across every HPC workload, the improvement on the Azure Cobalt 100 from the previous generation Neoverse N1 instances is impressive – with performance uplifts of 50-90%, and performance per dollar increased between 60-110%..

Rescale, a pioneer of HPC solutions in the cloud, provides their leading platform for engineers, scientists, and innovators to accelerate product development and deliver engineering breakthroughs through high performance computing, R&D data cloud, and enabling applied AI. Rescale is an early adopter of Azure Cobalt 100, enabling them to support their customers with the broadest selection of R&D applications fully integrated with Azure Cobalt 100. Here is Joris Poort, CEO of Rescale explaining the benefits of HPC workloads on Azure Cobalt 100.  

EDA Workloads on Azure Cobalt 100

Today, we are happy to share that Arm also is an early adopter of Azure Cobalt 100 and has already seen significant performance and efficiency gains when deploying internal EDA workloads. In testing, we’ve seen a 1.5-2x acceleration compared to the previous generation Neoverse N1-based Azure VMs for key workloads. By harnessing the combined strengths of Arm’s processor technology and Azure’s cloud infrastructure, we are committed to empowering our customer ecosystem to accelerate innovation and bring groundbreaking products to market faster.

Arm Resources: Empowering Your Cloud Journey

To help you get the most out of Azure Cobalt 100, we’ve prepared a number of resources:

• Migration to Cobalt 100 with Arm Learning Paths: Streamline your transition to Cobalt 100 instances with comprehensive guides and best practices.  
• Arm Software Ecosystem Dashboard: Stay up-to-date on the latest software support for Arm.
• Arm Developer Hub: Whether you are just getting started on Arm or looking for resources to help you create top-performing software solutions, Arm Developer Hub has everything you need to start building better software and deliver rich experiences for billions of devices. Download, learn, connect, and question within our growing global developer community.

The general availability of Azure Cobalt 100-based cloud instances marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of cloud computing. Embrace the power, efficiency, and flexibility of Arm Neoverse CSS and experience a new level of performance for your workloads. Visit the Microsoft Azure Portal to launch Cobalt 100 VMs for your workloads today!