Crucial milestone for AMD’s EPYC CPUs has been reached as Microsoft Azure adds a new L-Series VM which leverages the chip’s enormous PCIe Connectivity potential.
Crucial milestone for AMD’s EPYC CPUs has been reached as Microsoft Azure adds a new L-Series VM which leverages the chip’s enormous PCIe Connectivity potential.
PRESS RELEASE
SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Dec. 5, 2017 — AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced the first public cloud instances powered by the AMD EPYC™ processor. Microsoft Azure has deployed AMD EPYC processors in its datacenters in advance of preview for its latest L-Series of Virtual Machines (VM) for storage optimized workloads. The Lv2 VM family will take advantage of the high-core count and connectivity support of the AMD EPYC processor.
“We are extremely excited to be partnering with Microsoft Azure to bring the power of AMD EPYC processors into their datacenter,” said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager of Enterprise Solutions. “There is tremendous opportunity for users to tap into the capabilities we can deliver across storage and other workloads through the combination of AMD EPYC processors on Azure. We look forward to the continued close collaboration with Microsoft Azure on future instances throughout 2018.”
Corey Sanders, director of compute, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Corp, said, “We’re welcoming AMD’s new EPYC processor to Microsoft Azure with the next generation of our L-Series Virtual Machines. The new Lv2-Series are High I/O, dense storage offerings which make EPYC perfect for Azure customers’ demanding workloads. We’ve enjoyed a deep collaboration with AMD on our next generation open source cloud hardware design called Microsoft’s Project Olympus. We think Project Olympus will be the basis for future innovation between Microsoft and AMD, and we look forward to adding more instance types in the future benefiting from the core density, memory bandwidth and I/O capabilities of AMD EPYC processors.”
The Lv2-Series instances run on the AMD EPYC 7551 processor, featuring a base core frequency of 2.2 GHz and a maximum single-core turbo frequency of 3.0 GHz. With support for 128 lanes of PCIe connections per processor, AMD provides over 33 percent more connectivity than available two-socket solutions to address an unprecedented number of NVMe drives directly.
The Lv2 VMs will be available starting at eight and ranging to 64 vCPU sizes, with the largest size featuring direct access to 4TB of memory. These sizes will support Azure premium storage disks by default and will also support accelerated networking capabilities for the highest throughput of any cloud. With the unique capabilities enabled by AMD EPYC processors and Microsoft Azure, Lv2 is a perfect fit for storage-intensive workloads.
The Lv2-Series instances are based on Microsoft’s Project Olympus design, first introduced just over a year ago as Microsoft’s next generation hyperscale cloud hardware design. This groundbreaking design serves as a new model for open source hardware development with the Open Compute Project community.
Additional Resources
• Microsoft Azure Blog on AMD EPYC
• AMD EPYC on AMD.com
• Follow AMD datacenter developments on Twitter @AMDServer
• AMD EPYC on AMD.com
• Follow AMD datacenter developments on Twitter @AMDServer
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Editor’s Notes
Microsoft pledged that AMD’s EPYC CPUs would be integrated into their Azure Cloud Computing platform earlier this year, and today’s roll-out represents an extremely important milestone for both companies. Clearly it’s most significant for AMD, who are eager to impress and demonstrate the potential of EPYC’s architecture in a real-world setting.
Currently, AMD project that these new Lv2 Virtual Machines will be particularly well suited to non-SQL databases and Apache Spark builds, but feasibly any workload which can effectively make use of the enormous PCIe bandwidth available will be more than suitable.
In a preview press briefing AMD were keen to stress that this is far from the limit of their ambitions when it comes to Microsoft’s Cloud Compute product stack, and more announcements on the subject may be made before the end of the year.
