Microsoft unveils beefy custom AMD chip to crunch HPC workloads on Azure

Ignite One of the advantages of being a megacorp is that you can customize the silicon that underpins your infrastructure, as Microsoft is demonstrating at this week's Ignite conference in Chicago.

Redmond is bringing to its Azure cloud platform a custom hardware security module (HSM) and its own data processing unit (DPU), plus an intriguing custom AMD processor to power virtual machine instances targeting high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Described as Microsoft's latest advance in CPU-based supercomputing, the Azure HBv5 virtual machine is powered by custom AMD Epyc 9V64H processors. These are based on Zen 4 CPU cores rather than the latest Zen 5 technology, at up to 4 GHz peak frequency.

Unlike most VM instances, which typically share a processor with others, the Azure HBv5 will be spread across four Epyc 9V64H processors, for up to 352 cores and up to 9 GB of memory per core, supporting ...