Microsoft recently announced the general availability (GA) of its Azure Cobalt 100-based Virtual Machines (VMs), powered by Microsoft’s custom-designed Cobalt 100 Arm processors. According to the company, these VMs offer up to 50% improved price performance over previous Arm-based offerings.
The GA release follows up on the earlier preview this year. The Cobalt 100-based VMs are tailored for a broad range of computing tasks. With Arm architecture at the core, these VMs are built for energy-efficient, high-performance workloads and are available as general-purpose Dpsv6-series, Dplsv6-series, and memory-optimized Epsv6-series VMs.
Any VM in the series is available with and without local disks, so users can deploy the option that best suits their workload:
- The Dpsv6 and Dpdsv6 VM series offer up to 96 vCPUs and 384 GiB of RAM (4:1 ratio), suitable for scale-out workloads, cloud-native solutions, and small to medium databases.
- The Dplsv6 and Dpldsv6 VMs provide up to 96 vCPUs and 192 GiB of RAM (2:1 ratio), ideal for media encoding, small databases, gaming servers, and microservices.
- The Epsv6 and Epdsv6 memory-optimized VMs offer up to 96 vCPUs and 672 GiB of RAM (up to 8:1 ratio), designed for memory-intensive workloads like large databases and data analytics.
All these VMs support remote disk types such as Standard SSD, Standard HDD, Premium SSD, and Ultra Disk storage.
Sustainability is crucial to Microsoft’s strategy, and the new Azure Cobalt 100-based VMs contribute to this vision. Arm-based architecture is inherently more energy-efficient than traditional x86 processors, resulting in lower carbon footprints for businesses that adopt these machines. As enterprises globally prioritize green computing, this launch aligns with Microsoft’s broader goals of reducing emissions and offering more sustainable cloud solutions.
Regarding sustainability and energy-efficient computing power, AWS offers various Amazon EC2 Instances powered by AWS Graviton processors, which are also based on Arm architecture. Furthermore, Google Cloud also Ampere Altra Arm-based processors with Google Compute Engine Tau T2A Instances.
One of Microsoft's partners, Databricks, has integrated the Azure Cobalt 100 VMs into their Databricks Data Intelligence Platform on Azure, which unlocks new possibilities for handling data-heavy workloads with greater efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. The company writes in a blog post:
With up to 50% better price-performance than previous generations, Cobalt 100 VMs enable Databricks customers to benefit from superior performance and lower operating costs.
Lastly, more details on pricing and availability are available on the Azure VM pricing and pricing calculator pages.
