Microsoft announces the preview of Cobalt 100-based virtual machines on Azure

Back in November, Microsoft first announced its first in-house designed cloud compute processor named Azure Cobalt 100. Microsoft Azure Cobalt is a cloud-native chip based on Arm architecture optimized for performance, power efficiency and cost-effectiveness for general purpose workloads. Cobalt 100, is the first generation in the series and it is a 64-bit 128 core chip that can deliver up to 40% performance improvement over current generations of Azure Arm chips.

Today, Microsoft announced the preview of Azure virtual machines built to run on Cobalt 100 processors. The new Cobalt 100 based VMs are already powering Microsoft’s own services. For example, IC3, the platform that powers conversations in Microsoft Teams is migrating to Cobalt-based Azure VMs to achieve up to 45% better performance when compared to existing x86 VMs.