AMD’s 2nd Gen EPYC Processors and Radeon Instinct MI25 GPUs Extend Microsoft Azure’s Cloud Offerings

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Image: AMD

AMD and Microsoft have teamed up to provide a new first. Some users of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service now have access to even more powerful hardware. AMD announced yesterday that they are making some enterprise server grade components available to Azure. Combining 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors and AMD Radeon Instinct™ MI25 GPUs to provide virtual desktop experiences. These visualization services will support simulations, graphics intensive projects, and entry level workers. Presently they are only available to customers in South Central U.S. and Europe West Azure regions. This partnership represents a couple of other firsts for AMD as well.

From AMD:

“The Azure NVv4 VMs are also the first 2nd Gen AMD EPYC- and AMD Radeon Instinct-powered VMs from any cloud provider, and the first Azure virtual desktop supported by AMD processors.”

Detailed Specifications:

  • General Purpose Workload Dav4 & Dasv4VM Series: The Dav4 and Dasv4 Azure VMs are made for a variety of general-purpose applications. Featuring the AMD EPYC™ 7452 processor, the VMs offer up to 96 vCPUs, 384 GBs of RAM, and 2,400 GBs of SSD-based temporary storage and support for Azure Premium SSDs. The Dav4 and Das v4 VMs offer great performance at competitive price points and can run enterprise-grade applications, relational databases and application servers.
  • Memory Optimized Workload Eav4 & Easv4 VM Series: The Eav4 and Easv4 Azure VMs are made for memory-intensive workloads. These new VMs were the first in the cloud to feature the AMD EPYC™ 7452 processor. The VMs offer up to 96 vCPUs, 672 GBs of RAM, and 2,400 GBs of SSD-based temporary storage. The Eav4 and Easv4 VMs offer great performance for large in-memory business critical workloads at competitive price points. The Eas-series VMs support Azure Premium SSDs.
  • HBv2 VM: The HBv2 VMs are purpose made for high-performance computing workloads like CFD, explicit finite element analysis, seismic processing, reservoir modeling, rendering and more. Featuring the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor and 200 gigabit/sec HDR InfiniBand, Azure recently announced that in a series of HPC benchmarks, HBv2 VMs eclipsed 80,000 cores for tightly-coupled simulation, providing on-premise supercomputing levels of performance, in the cloud.
  • NVv4 VM: Powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct MI25 GPUs, NVv4 delivers a modern desktop and workstation experience in the cloud. Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) based GPU partitioning offers four resource-balanced configuration options, from 1/8th to a full GPU, to deliver a flexible, security-focused, GPU-enabled virtual desktop experience. Customers can enjoy greater choice by matching resources more closely to their intended workloads making GPU-accelerated virtual desktops much more affordable than ever before.
  • LSv2: The LSv2-series is well suited for big data applications, SQL and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, and large transactional databases. The LSv2 VMs run on the AMD EPYC 7551 processor with an all core boost of 2.55GHz.

AMD has a large presence in the high-performance computing world. Their presence can be found in any number of vectors from research, cloud computing, supercomputers, and even professional racing. Curious about more EPYC stories? We’ve got many here.

Peter Brosdahl
As a child of the 70’s I was part of the many who became enthralled by the video arcade invasion of the 1980’s. Saving money from various odd jobs I purchased my first computer from a friend of my dad, a used Atari 400, around 1982. Eventually it would end up being a lifelong passion of upgrading and modifying equipment that, of course, led into a career in IT support.

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