AMD announced that the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors and AMD Radeon Instinct MI25 GPUs are extending performance advantages through Microsoft Azure NVv4 virtual machines (VMs). 

These VMs, which are now generally available to customers in South Central U.S. and Europe West Azure regions, provide a virtual desktop experience, enabling customers to power remote visualization services and virtual desktops in the cloud to support entry-level workers, as well as graphics-intensive visualization workloads like CAD and simulations.

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

This announcement builds momentum for AMD-powered Azure VMs including the general availability of the Dav4-series and Eav4-series VM, made for general purpose and memory intensive workloads, and the general availability of the HBv2-Series VMs for high-performance computing workloads.

“AMD processors give cloud providers and end customers access to some of the best performance, scalability and affordability for a variety of workloads,” said Forrest Norrod, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Group, AMD. “Working together with Microsoft Azure, one of our foundational AMD EPYC partners, we are excited to extend our performance advantages to new virtualization workloads with the first ever 2nd Gen AMD EPYC- and AMD Radeon Instinct MI25-powered VMs from any cloud provider. The unique combination of AMD CPUs and GPUs provide a differentiated solution for our cloud customers and bring new capabilities to end users, whether they are accessing a virtual desktop in the cloud or running complex and heavy simulations.”

“AMD and Microsoft Azure share a history of bringing new capabilities and levels of performance with VMs that support a variety of customer workloads like high-performance computing to memory optimized and to general purpose, and now we are giving customers a scalable experience for desktop virtualization workloads,” said Girish Bablani, corporate vice president of Azure Compute at Microsoft. “With the NVv4 series VMs, Azure becomes the first cloud provider to offer a VM powered by an AMD EPYC CPU and AMD Radeon Instinct GPU, and we look forward to building even more success in cloud computing with AMD.”

Driving High Performance Azure VMs with AMD

As the first global cloud provider to support 1^st and 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors, Azure is enabling VMs that provide customers with leading experiences for a variety of cloud workloads, including general purpose, memory-optimized, high performance computing and even virtual desktop environments.  

AMD powered Azure VMs include:

• 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 2^nd 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 2^nd 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.

With the wide availability of 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors, AMD is raising the bar for partner milestones in performance, price/performance and scalability. The AMD EPYC and Radeon Instinct-powered Azure VMs are all generally available now. To learn more, visit the Azure Virtual Machines webpage here.