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Azure gets two next-gen VMs with AMD 4th gen EPYC processors

by on11 November 2022


Microsoft gets its foot in the door 

After AMD announced its 4th gen EPYC processors, Microsoft has unveiled its two HX-series and HBv4-series -- next-gen Azure VMs.

The HX-series includes the latest technologies but also AMD EPYC processors but compontents from "Genoa X" which should appear with the H1 GA release next year.

The new VMs feature:

800 GB/s of DDR5 memory bandwidth (STREAM TRIAD).
400 Gb/s NVIDIA Quantum-2 CX7 InfiniBand, the first on the public cloud.
80 Gb/s Azure Accelerated Networking.
PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs delivering 12 GB/s (read) and 7 GB/s (write) of storage bandwidth.

Microsoft's testing indicates that the HBv4 and HX perform at least 2x better than the HBv3 series, and around 4-5x better than "four-year-old" server technology. Workloads that have been denoted as being optimized for the new series' include computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis, frontend and backend electronic design automation (EDA), rendering, molecular dynamics, computational geoscience, weather simulation, AI inference, and financial risk analysis.

The VM in the HX-series is targeting larger models that use processes of 3, 4, and 5nm standards. With up to 60 GB of RAM per core, HX VMs will be showcasing 3x more RAM than any H-series VM that users have experienced before. Both of the new series will also be Azure's first ones to utilize the 400 Gigabit NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand.

Microsoft tells us that the HBv4 VMs will be upgraded to Genoa X processors when they come out. The additional 3D V-cache will become available at the same time.

 

Last modified on 14 November 2022
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