Microsoft Azure’s Cobalt 100 Processors Set New Standards in Cloud Computing Performance

Brian:  Hi and welcome to another Arm Viewpoints podcast. Today, we’re going to get our heads in the cloud. Specifically, what’s the latest in cloud computing when it comes to Microsoft and Arm? Cloud users and developers continue to seek out efficient and scalable compute solutions, and for modern cloud-native applications, including the growing demand for AI.

Microsoft has been at the forefront, offering innovative system to software optimization across this Azure platform. Today, we’re going to discuss a major milestone in Arm and Microsoft’s journey. The general availability of Azure Virtual Machines powered by the Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystem Space Azure Cobalt 100 processor.

Microsoft Mechanics This is a big moment, and it highlights the two companies commitment to delivering exceptional performance, scalability, and a thriving ecosystem for diverse workloads. Today, we have two guests, Arpita Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager for Azure Platforms for Microsoft, and Bhumik Patel, Director of Software Ecosystem Development within Arm’s infrastructure line of business.

In this episode, we talk about the general availability of Cobalt 100 based virtual machines and their impressive performance gains, how these new VMs deliver up to 50 percent better price performance compared to previous generation Azure Arm based VMs, Microsoft’s strategic drive toward Azure The benefits for organizations seeking more efficient and sustainable cloud computing solutions and much, much more.

Without further delay, let’s welcome Arpita and Bhumik. Arpita, Bhumik, thanks for joining us today. Hi, Brian. Arpita, let’s start with you. Let’s talk about this amazing announcement, the Cobalt 100 launch. Tell us a little bit about [00:02:00] it.

Arpita: Yeah. Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Microsoft recently announced the general availability of the Cobalt 100 based general purpose DPSV6 and DPLSV6 series VMs and memory optimized EPSV6 series VMs.

These VMs are based on Cobalt 100 processor using Arm, Neoverse, and Tune. The new Cobalt 100 based VMs offer up to 50 percent better price performance compared to previous generation as your arm based VMs. Making these VMs an attractive option for wide range of workloads. Additionally, these VMs deliver leading performance across various workloads compared to our previous generation as well, such as up to 1.

4x CPU performance, up to 1. 5x performance on Java based workload, up to 2x performance on web servers, NET applications, and in memory cache applications, and also up to 4x local storage IOPS, With NVMe local disk support. So as we can see that these VMs are [00:03:00] great choice for variety of workloads here.

Brian: So catch us up to today’s announcement. What led to the Cobalt 100 development?

Arpita: Yeah. Microsoft is driving towards optimization across every layer of infrastructure stack from silicon to servers to services. This will enable us to provide our customers with customized processors and infrastructure with better price performance and power efficiencies and also enable us to diversify our Azure infrastructure by offering various architectural choices to our customers.

It will provide us greater flexibility to meet our customer needs.

Brian: So speaking of customers and other stakeholders, who benefits from using Cobalt 100?

Arpita: Yeah, so the new Azure VMs, which are powered by Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based processors, benefit all organizations seeking, better price performance and more power efficient [00:04:00] VMs for their scale out and cloud native workloads.

As these cloud native workloads evolve and expand in their regional, In their requirements, it is essential for these workloads to operate efficiently at scale in a cost effective way, ensuring high performance as well as while also providing environmental sustainability. And as we can see that these Cobalt 100 based VMs fulfills these requirements and delivers it all.

Additionally, I would like to add that these VMs provide full physical core for vCPU, enabling workloads to achieve both linear and consistent performance at scale. These new Cobalt 100 based VMs are offered in three different memory to vCPU ratios and are offered both with and without local disk. So DP SV six series VMs are ideal for small to medium open source databases, application servers, web servers, et cetera.

D-P-L-S-V V six series VMs are perfect for media [00:05:00] encoding small databases, game servers, and other services microservices. PSV six series memory optimized VMs are designed for memory intensive workloads, like large databases in memory cache and analytics workloads, and many more.

Brian: So Bhoomik, as we like to say, it takes a village in instances like this.

Talk about how this is helping the Arm software ecosystem prepare for Cobalt 100. What’s going on in that part of this story?

Bhumik: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Brian. Let me touch upon a couple aspects of the ecosystem and what that means for developers and end customers that are listening in today, and that are looking to deploy their Unix and cloud native based applications on Cobalt 100 VMs.

So firstly we at Arm have been investing in enabling a mature software ecosystem for the Arm architecture over the years. And I’ve really been playing a leadership role when it comes to contributing to major open source projects across the [00:06:00] software stack, right? And along with this engineering investment by Arm, we’ve also built strong ecosystem partnerships and we kind of benefit from the great work done by our partners in the ecosystem, which ultimately provides customers a lot of choice and developers with a frictionless experience while building on Arm.

So if you look at the software stack, we’ve got robust support across the Linux landscape with all major distribution providing out of the box support for the Arm architecture. If you look at the cloud native infrastructure, and this is timely, as I record this from KubeCon in Salt Lake City this year where you see majority of CNCF projects, including of course, Kubernetes and leading CICB tools, such as GitHub, GitLab, and CircleCI, providing native support for building multi architecture images.

And not only that when you look at CICD options and the work you’ve done with partners such as GitHub, we’ve really shown that using GitHub’s managed services, developers can gain, up to 40 percent fast efficiencies compared to building their own CICD pipeline. So there is this choice that I mentioned [00:07:00]and efficiencies you can leverage through the ecosystem partnerships we have built.

In addition to this cloud native tool chain, We’ve also got first class citizen support across the leading languages such as Java, Go, NET, Rust, Python, and others, and leading frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, and ONNX for the AI workloads, right? For developers leveraging all this infrastructure support, you can then really ultimately deploy your applications with greater performance and achieve cost efficiencies overall that are provided by the Arm architecture and by the Cobalt 100 VMs, right?

So what you’ve shown last month when the Cobalt 100 VMs became generally available was how you could deploy all this wide range of cloud workloads and achieve optimal performance benefits such as for NGINX for a web scale, databases such as Redis and PostgreSQL, even applications such as HPC and EDA workloads using leading software tools across the industry and achieving this TCO benefits, right?

So you can check this out on our Arm blog [00:08:00] for the Cobalt 100 VMs. And secondly, and briefly, let me touch upon how our partnership with Microsoft further strengthens this Arm software ecosystem, right? So we’ve had a strong partnership with Microsoft over the years, both at the compute subsystem and the silicon level, right?

Working with the mic, working with Microsoft silicon teams in bringing the Cobalt 100 VMs to the market and also at the software level. So for the software level and what this means to the ecosystem. We work really closely with the Microsoft teams on providing performance implements to various projects such as NET for the ARM64 architecture.

Open source projects such as Azure Linux and Microsoft Build for OpenJDK also provide native support for the Arm architecture. And these are, just a couple examples of our collaborations that, that our audience can benefit from as they build their applications for the Cobalt 100 VMs.

Brian: Now, talk a little bit about. How we’re actually deploying this technology at arm ourselves. [00:09:00]

Bhumik: Yeah, so one of the use cases we’ve publicly mentioned is around the EDA workloads, right? So designing our own IP flows in the cloud on Cobalt 100 VMs leveraging industry leading tools from Cadence and Synopsys and Siemens and gaining those performance efficiencies I mentioned about, right?

So some of these are very CPU intense workloads and what we kind of showcase is. The first class performance you get on the Cobalt 100 VMs at production scale leveraging all the simulations and the design workflows that are required for Silicon design.

Brian: This is a fantastic achievement.

Congratulations to the Microsoft team for bringing this to market. Arpita, do you have any additional, I’m going to start that one again. Arpita, do you have any additional,

if I knew what the words were, I’d ask the question. Arpita, anything else we should know about this announcement? [00:10:00]

Arpita: Yeah, so high level, we welcome all to try these VMs out. They are in the portal CLI. And you can easily access it. These new Cobalt 100 based VMs are available in 14 Azure regions now, with more regions coming soon.

Also, customers using Azure Cobalt 100 based VMs with Linux can receive an extra 15 percent discount on new one year reserve instance agreement through March 2025. This is a great deal. And the aka. ms link is in the description below NUX promo offer. Secondly, another call out would be please visit our Cobalt 100 VMs GA blog for a list of all the regions and more information.

The aka. ms link is also in the description below the Cobalt 100 based VM GA blog is the link. Looking forward to all.

Brian: Fantastic. And Pumic, I’ll leave you with the last word.

Bhumik: Yeah, absolutely. In addition to what Arpita mentioned, there are some great resources that you could leverage [00:11:00] to learn more about the Arm software ecosystem and the tools and the guides that you can, you might need when you get started on deploying your applications for Cobalt 100.

The best place to go is developer. arm. com where you would find assets such as software ecosystem dashboard that we built, which has over 750. To 800 plus entries on both open source and commercial software that support Arm architecture, right? So if you’re getting started and you want to check quickly, check if this software or a package supports the Arm architecture, the dashboard gives you that quick view.

It also has assets such as learn. arm. com, which is basically providing tons of migration guides and guidance on worker optimizations. So really technical, deep dive, how to’s and guidance on. Various sorts of applications that you’re deploying. And last but not least, it also has our developer programs.

If you are a developer and you’re looking to get more active in the Arm ecosystem, there are [00:12:00]opportunities for you to join us. And an innovator in the Arm ecosystem. So these are the assets you can find. And last but not least, again we will be at Microsoft Ignite as well.

We have a digital presence and along with the Microsoft team, I will look forward to having more conversations with you at

Brian: Ignite. One of my favorite named industry events, Ignite. I just love that name. Anyway, thanks to you both. You’ve been so generous with your time and good luck with this as we roll this out in the next year or two.

Thanks, Brian. Thanks, everyone.

Arpita: Thank you.