Boy, 2020 sure could be a banner year for AMD! The chip giant has been securing wins left and right. And this latest one, of Azure VMs, is about as big as it gets in the cloud space.
Microsoft has announced the general availability of new virtual machine instances for Azure at its annual Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando on Monday. Part of an overall update to the underlying Azure infrastructure, these are additional configurations for AMD powered and Generation 2 instances.
AMD EPYC, specifically.
It was about a year ago that Amazon added AWS EC2 instances powered by these processors. Microsoft did the same a few months later. But now, the cloud giant is back for more!
That said, unlike Amazon Web Services, which gives users the choice between AMD and Intel processors for its latest generation of virtual machines, Azure is building all of its 4th generation instances with AMD processors.
While this decision will help Microsoft lower its costs, not all customers may not want to use AMD for their workloads. Nevertheless, these AMD chips are right up there with Intel, and recommended for enterprise grade use cases, like applications, relational databases, in-memory caching and analytics.
Users have the choice of the new v4 Azure D-series and E-series instances that are powered by the AMD EPYC processors. And they can also make use of the latest NV-series instances with Radeon Instinct GPUs.
Previously, you had to choose between non-GPU accelerated virtual machines that struggled to deliver the proper application experience for daily office use, or pay for a GPU accelerated workstation that was much more expensive.
No more.
Overall, this should be a welcome, cost saving measure to move applications to the cloud.
AMD processors have set the world on fire in terms of performance and value, and this is now being translated to the cloud.
