Build Microsoft is bringing its custom-designed Arm-based Cobalt 100 processors closer to the public as it now demonstrates the chips in an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) preview.
Deploy Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based virtual machines
The three strong VM series, labeled Dpsv6, Dplsv6 and Epsv6, will be available in the US, Northern and Western Europe and Southeast Asia as per an invitation from the tech giant. Azure subscribers will be able to try Cobalt 100-powered VMs for free, excluding any storage or other resource usage beyond the VM itself, provided they successfully request access to this limited preview.
While all three Cobalt 100 VM variants have access to up to 96 virtual cores, each offers a different RAM-to-core ratio, with Dplsv6 VMs getting 2GB per core, Dpsv6 4GB per core, and Epsv6 "up to" 8GB per core. That "up to" is an interesting caveat for Epsv6 to be aware of; instances of this VM type may not receive all the memory expected.
For example, Redmond says that Epsv6 VMs will have up to 672GB, but the promised memory-to-core ratio of up to 8:1 should mean a maximum of 768GB. The core topology of the VMs is also not clear, as each Cobalt 100 processor has 128 Arm-designed Neoverse N2 CPU cores, significantly more than the 96 virtual cores each VM has access to. We have contacted Microsoft to clarify these points.
