Microsoft announces general availability of Azure Cobalt 100-based VMs

During last year's Ignite conference, Microsoft first revealed that it was working on an ARM processor named Microsoft Cobalt 100 for general-purpose computing workloads on the Microsoft Cloud. Microsoft mentioned that the purpose of developing Cobalt 100 was to have an energy-efficient ARM chip for cloud-native offerings with an optimized performance-per-watt ratio in data centers.

At the Build developer conference earlier this year, Microsoft announced the preview availability of Azure Cobalt 100 processors in Azure Virtual Machines.

Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of the new Azure Cobalt 100-based VMs on Azure. Azure Cobalt 100 CPUs are now part of the new general-purpose Dpsv6-series, Dplsv6-series, and memory-optimized Epsv6-series VM series. Compared to Microsoft's previous generation of Arm-based VMs, Cobalt 100-based VMs offer up to 50% better price performance.

Here's the performance you can expect from these new VMs:

Up to 1.4x CPU performance
Up to 1.5x performance on Java-based workloads
Up to 2x performance on web servers, .NET applications, and in-memory cache applications
Support for 4x local storage IOPS (with NVMe)
Up to 1.5x network bandwidth

Due to the improved performance, Microsoft claims that these new ARM-based VMs are better suited for a wide range of scale-out and cloud-native Linux-based workloads. During the preview period, Microsoft worked with both internal and external customers to test the new Cobalt 100-based VMs. The IC3 platform, which powers Microsoft Teams, is now using Cobalt 100-based VMs to get up to 45% better performance.

The new Cobalt 100-based VMs are available in the following Azure regions: 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 will expand availability to Australia East, Brazil South, France Central, India Central, South Central US, UK South, West US 3, and West US in the coming months.