Microsoft recently announced the NVads A10 v5 series in preview. These virtual machines (VMs) are powered by NVIDIA A10 GPUs and AMD EPYC 74F3V(Milan) CPUs with a base frequency of 3.2 GHz and an all-core peak frequency of 4.0 GHz.
With NVadsA10v5-series, the public cloud provider introduces VMs with partial NVIDIA GPUs. As a result, customers can choose a suitable sized virtual machine for GPU accelerated graphics applications and virtual desktops starting at 1/6th of a GPU with 4-GiB frame buffer to a full A10 GPU with 24-GiB frame buffer. Michel Roth, Azure Virtual Desktop sales lead EMEA (GBB) at Microsoft, explains in a LinkedIn post:
Next to these very powerful specifications, what’s special about these VMs is that with the NVadsA10v5-series Azure is introducing virtual machines with partial NVIDIA GPUs. This means that you don’t have to pay for a full A10 if you don’t need it.
The GPU partitioning is built on industry-standard SR-IOV technology providing a strong, hardware-backed security boundary with predictable performance for each virtual machine. The public cloud provider partitions a single NVIDIA A10 GPU and allocates it to six virtual machines. Each virtual machine can only access the GPU resources that have been assigned to it, and the secure hardware partitioning prevents unauthorized access by other VMs.
Other public cloud providers like AWS also offer VMs with Nvidia A10 GPUs. For example, AWS released EC2 G5 instances earlier, which feature up to eight NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs powered by second-generation AMD EPYC processors. Like the NVads A10 v5 instances from Microsoft, these instances are intended to accelerate various graphics applications like interactive video rendering, video editing, computer-aided design, photorealistic simulations, 3D visualization, and gaming.
The multinational technology company Nvidia stated in a datasheet on the A10:
The NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPU combines with NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation (vWS) software to bring mainstream graphics and video with AI services to mainstream enterprise servers, delivering the solutions that designers, engineers, artists, and scientists need to meet today’s challenges.
The NVads A10 v5 series are in preview on request and available in the US South Central and West Europe Azure regions. Furthermore, pricing details on these series can be found on the Azure Virtual Machines pricing page.
