Today, I’m excited to announce the general availability of our new Fv2 VM family. Azure now offers the fastest Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor, code-named Skylake, in the public cloud. In Azure, we have seen growing demand for massive large-scale computation by customers doing financial modeling, scientific analysis, genomics, geothermal visualization, and deep learning. Our drive to continuously innovate in Azure allows us to offer cost effective and best-in-class hardware for these world-changing workloads. Recent announcements of ND, offering the first Tesla P40s in the public cloud, NCv2, offering Tesla P100s, and the only cloud with InfiniBand connectivity, Azure enables amazing, scale-out, GPU-powered calculations. Now, with the Fv2, Azure offers the fastest CPU-powered calculations based on the Intel Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor.
These VM sizes are hyper-threaded and run on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8168 processor, featuring a base core frequency of 2.7 GHz and a maximum single-core turbo frequency of 3.7 GHz. Intel® AVX-512 instructions, which are new on Intel Scalable Processors, will provide up to a 2X performance boost to vector processing workloads on both single and double precision floating point operations. In other words, they are really fast for any computational workload. The closest cloud competitor offering Skylake currently only offers 2.0 GHz. This makes Azure the best place for computationally-intensive workloads, with the newest and best tools for the job.
The Fv2 VMs will be available in 7 sizes, with the largest size featuring 72 vCPUs and 144 GiB of RAM. These sizes will support Azure premium storage disks by default and will also support accelerated networking capabilities for the highest throughput of any cloud and ultra-low VM to VM latencies. With the best performance to price ratio on Azure, Fv2 VMs are a perfect fit for your compute intensive workloads.
Here are the details on these new Fv2 VM sizes:
| Size | vCPUs | Memory: | Local SSD: | Max cached and local disk IOPS (cache size in GiB) | Max. data disks (1023 GB each) | Max.NICs |
| Standard_F2s_v2 | 2 | 4 GiB | 16 | 4000 (32) | 4 | 2 |
| Standard_F4s_v2 | 4 | 8 GiB | 32 | 8000 (64) | 8 | 2 |
| Standad_F8s_v2 | 8 | 16 GiB | 64 | 16000 (128) | 16 | 4 |
| Standard_F16s_v2 | 16 | 32GiB | 128 | 32000 (256) | 32 | 8 |
| Standard_F32s_v2 | 32 | 64GiB | 256 | 64000 (512) | 32 | 8 |
| Standard_F64s_v2 | 64 | 128GiB | 512 | 128000 (1024) | 32 | 8 |
| Standard_F72s_v2 | 72 | 144GiB | 576 | 144000 (1520) | 32 | 8 |
Starting today, these sizes are available in West US 2, West Europe, and East US. Southeast Asia is coming soon. I hope you enjoy these new sizes and I am excited to see what you will do with them!!
See ya around,
Corey