Microsoft Azure Adds Ampere Altra Arm CPUs

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Ampere Altra Q80 33 CPU In Wiwynn Socket
Ampere Altra Q80 33 CPU In Wiwynn Socket

Microsoft has a new cloud instance series, and it is quite a bit different. Microsoft Azure is deploying Ampere Altra-based cloud instances joining the ranks of the Oracle Cloud as well as several prominent Chinese hyper-scalers. This is the next step of a long journey for Microsoft.

Microsoft Azure Adds Ampere Altra Arm CPUs

In a blog post, Microsoft announced that it is deploying the Ampere Altra processors. This is actually a big step since we have seen Microsoft publicly state that they have been evaluating Arm servers for half a decade. For example see Microsoft at Open Compute Summit 2017: AI and ARM64 with Cavium and Qualcomm. Both the Cavium and Qualcomm chips ended up being canceled, but a big shift in the industry happened. TSMC was able to leapfrog Intel in the manufacturing process. As a result, larger Arm server CPUs started to have an advantage in terms of density, as the core performance increased.

Microsoft OCP AMR64
Microsoft OCP ARM64

Enter the Ampere Altra. This family goes up to 80 cores in its initial iteration launched alongside the AMD EPYC 7002 series and Cascade Lake generation Intel Xeons.

AMD EPYC Ampere Altra Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Small
AMD EPYC Ampere Altra Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Small

In the same socket, Ampere has the 128 core Altra Max. A dual-socket Altra Max platform has 256 Neoverse Arm cores. While Ampere is using Arm’s cores for this generation, it has also said that its future generations will use custom-designed cores diverging from Arm’s standard cores.

AMD EPYC 7003 Milan Ampere Altra Max Intel Xeon Ice Lake Front Close
AMD EPYC 7003 Milan Ampere Altra Max Intel Xeon Ice Lake Front Close

Now in 2022, we have Dpsv5 and Epsv5 Azure VM-series instances that can scale to 64 vCPUs per instance and have 2GB-8GB of memory per vCPU. The Dpsv5 (Dpsv5, Dpdsv5, Dplsv5, and Dpldsv5 depending on the capability) instances are focused on running workloads like web servers. The Epsv5 series (Epsv5 and Epdsv5) has higher memory for things like open source databases, and applications that use heavy memory caching. Here is Microsoft’s table with the new instances:

Series

vCPUs

Memory (GiBs)

Local Disk (GiBs)

Max Data Disks

Max NICs

Dpsv5-series

2 – 64

8 – 208

n/a

4 – 32

2 – 8

Dpdsv5-series

2 – 64

8 – 208

75 – 2,400

4 – 32

2 – 8

Dplsv5-series

2 – 64

4 – 128

n/a

4 – 32

2 – 8

Dpldsv5-series

2 – 64

4 – 128

75 – 2,400

4 – 32

2 – 8

Epsv5-series

2 – 32

16 – 208

n/a

4 – 32

2 – 8

Epdsv5-series

2 – 32

16 – 208

75 – 2,400

4 – 32

2 – 8

These instances are still in preview, but this is the first step toward having general availability instances in the Azure cloud.

Final Words

Microsoft is clearly heavily discounting the new Arm-based VMs in order to gain share. Amazon AWS is now pushing towards its third generation of public Graviton SKUs and Microsoft did not have a real alternative. Microsoft has been hiring Arm processor designers, but the Ampere Altra provides a relatively easy way to get an Arm offering online quickly. One must remember that cloud instances are priced less on the underlying hardware, and more as a part of a broader portfolio and ecosystem so it gives large cloud providers a lot of leverage in terms of aggressively pricing new options, especially when introducing new architectures.

Since this does not get a lot of coverage in many parts of the world, Ampere, with the Altra/ Altra Max. has become a major player in the Chinese hyper-scale market for workloads like cloud gaming where many games require a physical core per user. Having more cores per socket means lower costs and many of the optimizations that are in modern x86 CPUs for high-performance computing are not needed. That is also why both Intel and AMD will ultimately need chips with higher core counts and less HPC focus. AMD Bergamo will match the 2021 Ampere Altra Max with 128 cores in a few quarters to start addressing the bifurcation in the market and the branching off of these lower general performance but higher density cores. By then, we expect Ampere to have at least one more generation out. Companies are certainly looking to Ampere to fill that “easy path” transition to Arm and we noted the growth of the Arm market, especially in China, in our OCP Summit 2021 speed run last year.

Ultimately, we would expect Microsoft to look into making its own chips as we saw it joining the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express UCIe 1.0 Launch. Microsoft may buy IP from different vendors, but the Ampere Altra was an easy way to get a pre-packaged solution into Azure after around 5 years of public work trying to get an Arm-based solution.

3 COMMENTS

  1. “ARMing the locals”:

    For semi-retired ex Linux Sys Admin / Data Center Tech with ~50 aging Xeon chips affixed into various sheet metal skins as cannon fodder for my $HOMElab, saying I hope to see more ARMish warriors in the data center space might seem odd.

    Yeah it may seem petty, but as a former (late 70’s, all thru the 80’s) assembler / C programmer, I rarely met something as ugly as the x86 ISA. I always felt sorry for X86 compiler writers.

    At some point in the near future, I will be ARMing/”Apple Si-ing” my remote teaching wife’s IT infrastructure (2011, 2015 Intel-based MacBooks, original M1 based MacBook supplied by her school) with a mid-level Mac Studio (she does a lot of video work, has 34K YouTube followers).

    At least I live in the US, so “ARMing the locals” doesn’t have the same intense meaning as in a certain Eastern European country.

  2. You have to wonder what the endgame is for Ampere chasing the hyperscalers if MS and the others are just going to be building their own custom chips in 5 years with in-house design teams.

  3. Jim – remember that building your own custom server chip costs several hundred million. New processes are becoming ever more expensive. It only makes sense if you have the money and volume – only the largest hyperscalers will roll their own. Do you expect companies like CloudFlare to design their own CPU? There is still a significant market for server chips.

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