Microsoft brings Arm chip support to Azure virtual machines

San Francisco: Tech giant Microsoft has announced a preview of Arm support on Azure virtual machines via its work with Ampere Computing.

A startup that makes server chips, Ampere announced last year that it had signed up Microsoft and Tencent Holdings as major customers, ZDNet reported.

"We are now supporting Arm on Azure as well. This has been a long journey to bring up Ampere on Azure with Windows as the Root Host OS! We are also supporting Windows 11 Arm VMs in preview for developers!" Hari Pulapaka, the director of PM for Azure Host OS and the Windows OS platform, wrote on Twitter.

"FYI all Windows developers who have been asking for VM support in Azure, it's here now," he added.

Azure VMs with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors will offer up to 50 per cent better price-performance than comparable x86-based VMs for scale-out workloads, Microsoft officials said.

These new VMs are also for Web servers, application servers, open-source databases, gaming servers, media servers, and more, they added.

The new Azure Virtual Machines, featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor, further extend the company's portfolio of compute solutions to help customers manage complexity and seamlessly run modern, dynamic and scalable applications.

The company said Azure customers will benefit from the improvements the new VMs provide in terms of scalability, performance, and operational efficiency.