Microsoft Azure to support AMD's new EPYC datacenter processors

AMD today launched the new EPYC 7000 series high-performance datacenter processors with up to 32 high-performance “Zen” cores that delivers greater performance than the competition across a full range of integer, floating point, memory bandwidth, and I/O benchmarks and workloads. AMD is clearly taking aim at Intel as Intel currently owns about 95% of the datacenter processor market.

AMD EPYC 7000-series processors will be supported by server hardware manufacturers including HPE, Dell, Asus, Gigabyte, Inventec, Lenovo, Sugon, Supermicro, Tyan, and Wistron. Microsoft has announced that they will support Windows Azure and Windows Server on AMD EPYC processors.

“We’ve worked to make Microsoft Azure a powerful enterprise grade cloud platform, that helps guide the success of our customers, no matter their size or geography,” said Girish Bablani, corporate vice president, Azure Compute, Microsoft Corp. “To power Azure, we require the most cutting-edge infrastructure and the latest advances in silicon which is why we intend to be the first global cloud provider to deliver AMD EPYC, and its combination of high performance and value, to customers.

According to AMD, EPYC 7601 CPU-based one-socket system will provide up to 20% CapEx savings compared to the Intel Xeon E5-2660 v4-based two-socket system. At every targeted price point for two-socket processors, EPYC outperforms the competition, with up to 70% more performance in the eight hundred dollar price band and up to 47% more performance at the high-end of the market of four thousand dollars or more.

Learn more about AMD EPYC here.