In-house DPU and HSM silicon also shown off
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 6.9 TBps of memory bandwidth across 400-450 GB of HBM3 memory.
Microsoft claims this memory bandwidth is up to 8x that of the latest bare-metal or virtual machine instances available on rival platforms. Hence the firm is pitching HBv5 at the most memory-constrained HPC applications, such as computational fluid dynamics, automotive and aerospace simulation, weather modeling, energy research, molecular dynamics, and computer-aided engineering.
