Azure releases Cobalt on ARM; shown by Liftr Insights

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Nov 13, 2024, 10:08 ET

Liftr Insights data reveals extent of Azure's deployment; following AWS's lead almost a decade prior.

AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 13, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Liftr Insights, a pioneer in market intelligence driven by unique data, revealed data showing the first appearance of Azure's Cobalt CPU on the ARM architecture.

Liftr data has shown the first appearance of the Cobalt CPU designed by Azure. These new instance types, first appearing in 21 different regions across 4 continents, are run on the ARM architecture and will complement the existing ARM-based instances at Azure, which were sold to Azure by Ampere Computing.

Azure Cobalt ARM-based instances seen by Liftr Insights data

"Our customers and the supply chain has been talking about this shift to 'home-grown' coming for years," says Tab Schadt, CEO of Liftr Insights. "Many years back, AWS forged ahead to prove the value of running instances on their own designs."

Intel and AMD are paying attention. While their sales to cloud providers have risen over the past few years, as shown by Liftr data, they were losing an increasing portion of the total market each month. That portion was going to ARM-based processors. While ARM represented 4.7% of public cloud CPUs at the end of 2021, it is close to representing 1 out of every 10 instances. For AWS, ARM is close to 1 out of 4 instances. While Azure has less ARM coverage, the introduction of Cobalt implies more growth of ARM is coming.

Ampere Computing is also watching these developments. After AWS's initial success with their ARM-based instances, Graviton, all the other top cloud providers eventually adopted ARM using Ampere CPUs. Ampere grew from a few hundred instance types in 2021 to thousands and supporting 24.9% of the ARM instances in the cloud as of mid-2024.

"In addition to the power benefits of ARM, price-point is also a factor for enterprises," says Schadt.

Liftr data show that the average price of the ARM-based instances on a pre-core basis is 50.5% the cost of x86 instances. This is even after a history of x86 prices per core decreases and ARM prices increases, according to Liftr Insights' half-a-decade of history.

About Liftr Insights
Liftr Insights generates reliable market intelligence using unique data, including details about configurations, components, deployment geo, and pricing for:

Server processors: Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC, Aliyun Yitian, AWS Graviton, and Ampere Computing Altra
Datacenter compute accelerators: GPUs, FPGAs, TPUs, and AI chips from NVIDIA, Xilinx, Intel, AMD, AWS, Google, and Qualcomm.

As shown on the Liftr Cloud Regions Map at https://bit.ly/LiftrCloudRegionsMap, among the companies tracked are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Tencent Cloud, CoreWeave, Lambda, and Vultr as well as semiconductor vendors AMD, Ampere, Intel, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA. Liftr Insights subject matter experts translate company-specific service provider data into actionable alternative data.

Liftr and the Liftr logo are registered service marks of Liftr Insights. The following are trademarks and/or service marks of Liftr Insights: Liftr Insights, Cloud Components Tracker, Intelligence Compute Tracker, and Liftr Cloud Regions Map.

The following are registered intellectual property marks, trademarks, or service marks of their respective companies:
Amazon Web Services
Microsoft Azure
Alibaba Cloud
Google Cloud
Oracle Cloud
Tencent Cloud
CoreWeave
Lambda
Vultr
Intel Corporation
Ampere Computing
Qualcomm
NVIDIA
AMD
ARM