Azure has announced the public preview of its new D and E family virtual machines (VMs) powered by the 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors with integrated Intel® Accelerator Engines. These VMs represent the first Azure instances using this generation of processors, offering a substantial improvement in performance, cost efficiency, and energy usage for current workloads.
The public preview VMs feature Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel® AMX), a built-in accelerator that enhances deep-learning training and inference performance on the CPU. This capability allows workloads such as natural language processing, recommendation systems, and image recognition to achieve high performance within a more secure environment. To facilitate faster model development and deployment, Intel® AMX instructions are integrated into the PyTorch and TensorFlow frameworks.
The Dv6 VMs offer a balanced memory-to-vCPU ratio and can scale up to 128 vCPUs and 512 GB of RAM. These VMs are suitable for a wide range of enterprise-grade applications, e-commerce systems, and entry-level to mid-range databases.
The Ev6 VMs cater to memory-intensive workloads, supporting up to 192 vCPUs and 1,832 GB of RAM. These are ideal for applications such as SAP, large relational database servers, data warehousing, business intelligence applications, and in-memory analytics.
The new VMs are available in various configurations with different memory-to-core ratios and offer options with or without local SSDs. The lineup includes the General Purpose Dsv6, Dlsv6, Ddvs6, and Dldsv6 series, as well as the Memory Optimized Esv6 and Edsv6 series. Additionally, the Esv6 series offers constrained core variants, perfect for workloads that demand high data throughput without a large number of vCPUs.
These VMs are built on the 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8537C processor and provide:
- 20% higher vCPU performance and three times larger L3 cache compared to the previous generation Intel Dl/D/Ev5 VMs.
- Up to 260,000 IOPS and 12.5 GB/s remote storage throughput.
- Up to 200 Gbps VM network bandwidth powered by Azure Boost.
- 46% larger local SSD capacity with over three times the read IOPS.
- 84 new VM sizes, ranging from 2 to 192 vCPUs, and up to 1.8 TB of memory.
- NVMe interface for both local and remote disks across all sizes.
These enhancements significantly boost the performance of Intel VM options available to Azure customers.
VMs with less than 1 TB of memory are currently available for deployment in the US West and US East regions, with larger VMs (1 TB or more) expected to join the preview in June or July 2024.