Public Preview: New AMD-based VMs with Increased Performance, Azure Boost, and NVMe Support

Written by Lauren Britton, PhD, Sr. Product Manager and Sasha Malamed, Sr. Product Manager, Azure Compute VMs Platform

Summary

We are thrilled to announce new general purpose, memory-optimized, and compute-optimized virtual machines (VMs) based on 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs (Genoa). The new VM series, Dalsv6, Dasv6, Easv6, Falsv6, Fasv6, and Famsv6, will be made available in Public Preview in the first quarter of 2024. These new VMs offer improved price/performance versus the prior Dasv5 and Easv5 VMs and NVMe connectivity for faster local and remote storage access. The new AMD-based VM series will include Azure Boost. To sign up for the preview, see the link below.

What’s New

The new Dalsv6, Davs6, and Easv6 VMs are offered with vCPU counts ranging from 2 to 96 vCPUs. The new VMs will also come in a variety of memory (GiB)-to-vCPU ratios, including the Dalsv6 at 2:1, Dav6 at 4:1, and Easv6 at 8:1 ratios. The VMs are also available with and without a local disk so that you can choose the option that best fits your workload. On average, workloads can expect 20% CPU performance improvement over the Dasv5 and Easv5 VMs and better price/performance.

Further expanding our offerings, we are proud to introduce the first Compute-optimized VM series based on AMD processors which come in three different memory-to-vCPU ratios. The new Falsv6, Fasv6, and Famsv6 VMs offer the fastest x86 CPU performance amongst same segment VMs from major cloud providers. This VM series has up to 2x CPU performance improvement over the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs (Milan)-based v5 VMs, as shown in the graph below.

We are excited to announce that all the new Dalsv6, Dasv6, Easv6, and suite of Fasv6 virtual machines are powered by Azure Boost. Azure Boost has been providing benefits to millions of existing Azure VMs in production today, such as enabling exceptional remote storage performance and significant improvements in networking throughput and latency. Our latest Azure Boost infrastructure innovation, in combination with new AMD-based VMs, paves the way for accelerated improvements in performance, security, and reliability. To learn more about Azure Boost, read our blog.

To drive the best storage performance for your workloads, the new AMD-based VMs come with the NVMe interface for local and remote disks. Workloads can see up to 80% better remote storage performance, 400% faster local storage speeds, and 20% networking bandwidth improvement over the previous generation of AMD-based VMs.

General-purpose workloads

The new Dasv6-series VMs offer a balanced ratio of memory to vCPU performance and increased scalability, up to 96 vCPUs and 384 GiB of RAM. Whereas the new Dalsv6-series VM series are ideal for workloads that require less RAM per vCPU, with a max of 192 GiB of RAM. The Dalsv6 series are the first 2GiB/vCPU memory offerings in our AMD family of VMs. The Dalsv6 series can reduce costs when running non-memory intensive applications, including web servers, gaming, video encoding, AI/ML, and batch processing. The Dasv6-series VMs work well for many general computing workloads, such as e-commerce systems, web front ends, desktop virtualization solutions, customer relationship management applications, entry-level and mid-range databases, application servers, and more.

Memory-intensive workloads

For more memory demanding workloads, the new Easv6-series VMs offer high memory-to-vCPU ratios with increased scalability up to 96 vCPUs and 672 GiB of RAM. The Easv6-series VMs are ideal for memory-intensive enterprise applications, data warehousing, business intelligence, in-memory analytics, and financial transactions.

Compute-intensive workloads

For compute-intensive workloads, the new Falsv6, Fasv6 and Famsv6 VM series come without Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), meaning a vCPU equals a full core. These VMs will be the best fit for workloads demanding the highest CPU performance, such as scientific simulations, financial modeling and risk analysis, gaming, and video rendering.

The specifications of each VM series mentioned in this announcement are subject to change without prior notice.

Learn more about the new AMD-based VM-series Azure Virtual Machines preview

The Dalsv6, Dasv6, Easv6, Falsv6, Fasv6, and Famsv6 Virtual Machines will soon be made available in preview. The preview is initially available in Azure’s East US region and will be expanded to other regions throughout 2024.

During the preview period, the new series will be available with pay-as-you-go pricing. Spot Virtual Machines and Reserved Virtual Machine Instance pricing will not be available during the preview. Prices will vary by region.

To request access to the preview, please fill out this form. We look forward to hearing from you!