Nearly one year ago Microsoft announced the HBv5 virtual machines powered by a custom-designed AMD 4th Gen EPYC processor with high bandwidth memory (HBM3). Finally today the Azure HBv5 series is reaching general availability for those with memory-intensive HPC applications and other workloads. Microsoft kindly provided Phoronix with HBv5 access in advance to begin testing these new VMs with the AMD EPYC 9V64H CPUs featuring HBM memory, so here are some of the first independent benchmarks of these exciting processors powering Azure’s new HPC VM instances.
Last November the Azure HBv5 series was initially announced with these co-designed AMD EPYC CPUs with HBM memory. It has taken longer than expected and frankly I was wondering months ago if/when they would surface, but as of today the HBv5 series has reached general availability. Yes, they are still based on 4th Gen EPYC “Zen 4” rather than the 5th Gen EPYC (Zen 5 / Turin) that have been available for over a year as well, but even still these EPYC 9V64H processors are extremely potent with the HBM memory providing nearly 7TB/s of memory bandwidth.
The Microsoft Azure HBv5 series with EPYC 9V64H processors provide 6.9TB/s of memory bandwidth across 400~450GB of HBM3 memory. The VMs can be configured with up to 9GB of HBM3 memory per core and there are up to 368 AMD Zen 4 cores per server that clock up to 4.00GHz. The AMD EPYC 9V64H is running without SMT. With Zen 5 having the full 512-bit data path for AVX-512 rather than the “double pumped” AVX-512 Zen 4 design, it would have been interesting for a Zen 5 + HBM EPYC processor but for today given their timing and design trade-offs this is a Zen 4 based processor. But as you’ll see from the results, for memory intensive workloads the EPYC 9V64H is a compute monster.
In this initial article for today’s GA release is comparing the Azure HBv5 in its flagship configuration of 368 cores compared to the flagship configuration of their prior-gen HBv4 VM series. The Azure HBv4 is powered by the AMD EPYC 9V33X Genoa-X processors with 3D V-Cache and no SMT. The top-tier Azure HBv4 and HB5 instances were both running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the Linux 6.14 kernel, XFS file-system, and GCC 13.3 compiler among other stock software components.
From there a wide variety of HPC workloads were tested in this AMD EPYC Zen 4 comparison between HBv4 with Genoa-X 3D V-Cache and then HBv5 with the EPYC 9V64H yielding the impressive HBM3 loadout.
