AMD announced that the AMD Pensando Distributed Services Card, powered by the industry's most advanced data processing unit (DPU)1, will be one of the first DPU solutions to support VMware vSphere 8 available from leading server vendors including Dell Technologies, HPE and Lenovo.

As data center applications grow in scale and sophistication, the resulting workloads increase the demand on infrastructure services as well as crucial CPU resources. VMware vSphere 8 aims to reimagine IT infrastructure as a composable architecture with a goal of offloading infrastructure workloads such as networking, storage, and security from the CPU by leveraging the new vSphere Distributed Services Engine, freeing up valuable CPU cycles to be used for business functions and revenue generating applications.

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of the latest Azure Virtual Machines featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor. The new virtual machines will be generally available on September 1, and customers can now launch them in 10 Azure regions and multiple availability zones around the world. In addition, the Arm-based virtual machines can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This ability has been in preview and will be generally available over the coming weeks in all the regions that offer the new virtual machines.

Earlier this year, we launched the preview of the new general-purpose Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 and memory optimized Epsv5 Azure Virtual Machine series, built on the Ampere Altra processor. These new virtual machines have been engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads. Since then, hundreds of customers have tested and experienced firsthand the excellent price-performance that the Arm architecture can provide for web and application servers, open-source databases, microservices, Java and.NET applications, gaming, media servers, and more. Starting today, all Azure customers can deploy these new virtual machines using the Azure portal, SDKs, API, PowerShell, and the command-line interface (CLI).

Hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc., all run their cloud divisions with a specific goal. To provide their hardware to someone else in a form called instance and have the user pay for it by the hour. However, instances are usually bound by a specific CPU and memory configuration, which you can not configure yourself. But instead, you can only choose from the few available options that are listed. For example, when selecting one virtual CPU core, you get two GB of RAM and can go as high as you want with CPU cores. However, the available RAM will also double, even though you might not need it. When renting an instance, the allocated CPU cores and memory are yours until the instance is turned off.

And it is precisely this that hyperscalers are dealing with. Many instances don't fully utilize their DRAM, making the whole data center usage inefficient. Microsoft Azure, one of the largest cloud providers, measured that 50% of all VMs never touch 50% of their rented memory. This makes memory stranded in a rented VM, making it unusable for anything else.

At Azure, we find that a major contributor to DRAM inefficiency is platform-level memory stranding. Memory stranding occurs when a server's cores are fully rented to virtual machines (VMs), but unrented memory remains. With the cores exhausted, the remaining memory is unrentable on its own, and is thus stranded. Surprisingly, we find that up to 25% of DRAM may become stranded at any given moment.

The recent semiconductor shortage has put an unprecedented amount of focus on the industry. Both commercial and government entities have come to recognize the lack of advanced node semiconductor manufacturing capabilities onshore in the United States. Intel Foundry Services (IFS) entry into the commercial foundry space is poised to change all that. As part of IFS Accelerator program, Intel recently announced their new IFS Cloud Alliance program, with Microsoft Azure as one of the inaugural members.

This is the latest chapter in a partnership between Intel and Microsoft that stretches back decades all the way back to the early days of the personal computer. In the last few years, Intel and Microsoft have collaborated on advancing semiconductor design on the cloud by working together to bring out EDA centric cloud compute such as the FX series on Azure, working with EDA vendors to enhance their software to better take advantage of the elasticity of the Azure cloud, as well as collaborating on a secure cloud-based semiconductor development platform for the US Department of Defense RAMP and RAMP-C programs.

Today, Microsoft launches Azure Virtual Machines (VM) based on the Ampere Altra Cloud Native Processor. This marks an important milestone as developers can now take advantage of these modern high-performance VMs for their existing and greenfield applications. The Ampere Altra processor family leads in performance across a range of broadly deployed cloud workloads and is now making available the Arm architecture on Azure.

Industry leading performance and the most sustainable solution
Cloud users who have pushed the limits of legacy x86 architectures now have a high-performance compute alternative that scales up in a linear fashion and delivers predictable performance even at full utilization. For example, Ampere Altra VMs outperform equivalently sized Intel and AMD instances from the same generation by 39% and 47%, respectively.* In addition to being the high-performance choice, Ampere Altra processors are extremely power efficient, directly reducing users' overall carbon footprint.