Microsoft Unveils General Availability of Azure Cobalt 100 Virtual Machines

At last year’s Ignite conference, Microsoft introduced its ARM processor known as Microsoft Cobalt 100, designed specifically for versatile computing tasks on the Microsoft Cloud. The goal behind creating the Cobalt 100 was to produce an energy-efficient ARM chip tailored for cloud-native applications, optimizing the performance-to-power consumption ratio in data centers.

Earlier this year, during the Build developer conference, Microsoft made a significant announcement regarding the preview release of Azure Cobalt 100 processors within Azure Virtual Machines.

Today, Microsoft has confirmed that Azure Cobalt 100-based VMs are now generally available. These processors are integrated into the latest general-purpose Dpsv6-series, Dplsv6-series, and memory-optimized Epsv6-series of virtual machines. When compared to the previous generation of Arm-based VMs, those powered by Cobalt 100 deliver up to 50% improved price-performance efficiency.

Here’s what performance improvements you can anticipate with these new VMs:

Up to 1.4x enhancement in CPU performance
Up to 1.5x improvement for Java workloads
Doubling the performance on web servers,. NET applications, and in-memory caching applications
Support for quadruple local storage IOPS using NVMe
Enhancement of up to 1.5x in network bandwidth

Thanks to these performance upgrades, Microsoft asserts that the new ARM-based VMs are well-equipped to manage a variety of scale-out and cloud-native workloads based on Linux. Throughout the preview phase, the company collaborated with various internal and external clients to evaluate the new Cobalt 100 VM offerings. Notably, the IC3 platform that underpins Microsoft Teams has transitioned to using Cobalt 100-based VMs, achieving performance gains of up to 45%.

The Cobalt 100-based VMs are currently accessible in numerous Azure regions, including 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.

Microsoft plans to broaden the availability to additional regions such as Australia East, Brazil South, France Central, India Central, South Central US, UK South, West US 3, and West US over the upcoming months.

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