Microsoft claims its latest Arm-powered Azure virtual machines can provide up to 50 percent better price-performance than similar instances using x86 processors.

The computing giant announced Monday it is now previewing new D- and E-series VMs that use the Arm-compatible Altra server processors from chip startup Ampere Computing. The new Dpsv5 series is built for a variety of Linux enterprise application types, from web servers and .NET applications to open-source databases and application servers, while the new Epsv5 series is meant for memory-intensive Linux workloads, which includes data analytics, in-memory caching applications and gaming.

Evan Burness, principal program manager for Microsoft's Azure HPC business, on Twitter offered some context to the 50 percent price-performance boast. He claimed the Altra Arm-based VMs provide an uplift when compared to similar x86 instances that have hyperthreading, or simultaneous multi-threading, turned on and in use. When hyperthreading is enabled on the x86 VMs, each physical processor core is represented by two virtual cores.

Burness said disabling hyperthreading so that when you spin up, say, a virtual machine with 16 x86 cores, you really are getting 16 physical CPU cores, the performance gap between this x86 VM and its Altra VM equivalent is closed. "Customers can close or eliminate the gap just by disabling hyperthreading on the x86 D/E series," he argued.

You could disable hyperthreading on x86 but then you need to double the x86 instance size to maintain vCPU count and price will double

Ampere's chief product officer Jeff Wittich disagreed with this view. He countered that with hyperthreading disabled, one would need to double the physical x86 CPU core count to match the Altra core count, and in that case: x86 solidly loses on price-performance.

"To attempt performance parity with Ampere, you could disable hyperthreading on x86 but then you need to double the x86 instance size to maintain vCPU count and price will double," Wittich said.

Neither Burness nor Microsoft's blog post about the new Arm instances said whether the comparable x86 instances were based on Intel or AMD CPUs, both of which support hyperthreading, unlike Ampere that, as we said, support one hardware thread per CPU core.

The new Dpsv5 and Epsv5 VMs feature up to 64 virtual CPUs, and each vCPU can support memory configurations of 2GB, 4GB and 8GB for a total of 208GB for the entire instance. They also support up to 40 Gbps for networking, and there's an option for high-performance local SSD storage.

The VMs support a range of operating systems, including Canonical Ubuntu Linux, CentOS and Windows 11 Professional and Enterprise Edition on Arm. Microsoft also plans future support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Debian, AlmaLinux, and Flatcar.

The VMs have container support, too, via Azure Kubernetes Service.

For developers, Microsoft said the .NET5 and .NET6 platforms support Arm architecture. It's also supported by Microsoft Visual C++ tools, the Visual Studio Code editor and Java through Microsoft's recent JEP 388 contribution to OpenJDK.

Executives at Ampere and Arm said this is evidence that their CPU cores are ready for cloud primetime.

"The new Microsoft Azure VMs, powered by the Arm Neoverse-based Ampere Altra platform, highlight our deep collaboration with industry change-makers, and deliver on the power of choice to the cloud computing market," said Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager of Arm's infrastructure line of business.

As for whether anyone's using the new Arm-based Azure instances, Microsoft offered as an example one company, Amadeus, which provides IT services for the travel industry.

"With Azure Arm64 VMs, we will be able to deliver higher throughput and even better experiences than the x86 VM that we've used in the past," said Denis Lacroix, senior vice president of Amadeus' cloud transformation program in a canned statement. "Azure Arm64 VM series have proven to be a reliable platform for our applications, and we've accelerated our plans to deploy Arm64-based Azure solutions."

Executives at Linux shops Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE seem enthused too, but for the sake of brevity we'll only pull from one of the quotes Microsoft provided.

"We see companies using Arm based architectures as a way of reducing both cost and energy consumption," said Alexander Gallagher, vice president of public cloud at Canonical.

This push for more Arm-based cloud instances is expected to grow the CPU architecture's penetration rate in datacenter servers to 22 percent by 2025, according to a recent report by research firm TrendForce, which pointed to Amazon Web Services' homegrown CPUs as the major catalyst. ®

Editor's note: This article was updated to incorporate Ampere CPO Jeff Wittich's observations.

India's government and the European Union have signed up to create a "Trade and Technology Council" – an entity the EU has previously only created to enhance its relationship with the United States.

Details of the Council's scope of operations have not been revealed, but the EU/US version of the entity works on standards for emerging technologies, tech supply chains (including semiconductors), information security, data governance, preventing misuse of technology when it threatens security and human rights, and SME access to and use of digital technologies.

The EU has billed the formation of the Council as "a strong basis to intensify mutually beneficial and deeper strategic cooperation."

The San Diego Supercomputer Center in the US is ditching its lead-acid uninterruptible power supply (UPS) batteries for more environmentally friendly rechargeables – though it's avoiding lithium-ion, and going with a new form of rechargeable alkaline. 

Currently, the SDSC relies on a generator and UPS to provide emergency power. Because of environmental regulations in its home state of California, the SDSC has been unable to scale up the portion of its emergency power delivered by generators. The new batteries – half of which are already installed – will be a way to avoid running into that limitation.

Providing the 5,200 batteries, which replace 20,000 pounds of lead-acid, is Urban Electric Power (UEP). UEP's founder, Sanjoy Banerjee, developed the technology behind the batteries while a professor at City College of New York before spinning it off into a commercial proposition.

Special report Europe's Digital Markets Act – near-finalized legislation to tame the internet's gatekeepers – contains language squarely aimed at ending Apple's iOS browser restrictions.

The Register has received a copy of unpublished changes in the proposed act, and among the various adjustments to the draft agreement is the explicit recognition of "web browser engines" as a service that should be protected from anti-competitive gatekeeper-imposed limitations.

Apple requires that competing mobile browsers distributed through the iOS App Store use its own WebKit rendering engine, which is the basis of its Safari browser. The result is that Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on iOS are all, more or less, Safari.

China's Central Cyberspace Administration has revealed a plan for further and faster adoption of IPv6 across the nation and outlined plans to drive new developments for the protocol.

The Middle Kingdom's updated IPv6 ambitions were detailed yesterday in an announcement of the "2022 Work Arrangement for Further Promoting the Large-scale Deployment and Application of IPv6", which set the following goals for local IPv6 adoption by the end of 2022:

The US Army could end up wasting much as $22 billion in taxpayer cash if soldiers aren't actually interested in using, or able to use as intended, the Microsoft HoloLens headsets it said it would purchase, a government watchdog has warned. 

In 2018, the American military splashed $480 million on 100,000 prototype augmented-reality goggles from Redmond to see how they could help soldiers train for and fight in combat. The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) project was expanded when the Army decided it wanted the Windows giant to make custom, battle-ready AR headsets in a ten-year deal worth up to $22 billion. 

The project was delayed and is reportedly scheduled to roll out some time this year. But the US Dept of Defense's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) cast some doubt on whether it was worth it at all.

Crooks stole non-fungible tokens (NFTs) said to be worth about $3 million after breaking into the Bored Ape Yacht Club's Instagram account and posting a link to a copycat website that sought to harvest marks' assets. 

The bogus post promised a free airdrop – basically, a promotional token giveaway – to users who followed the link and connected their MetaMask crypto-asset wallets to the scammer's wallet. Rather than getting free stuff, victims instead had their digital pocketbooks cleaned out.

"It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked. Do not mint anything, click links, or link your wallet to anything," Bored Ape Yacht Club tweeted Monday morning in a warning that came too late for some of its members.

In a move sure to reassure those pushing for an all-virtual future, Facebook-owner Meta has announced it's opening its first physical store.

Opening May 9 at Meta's campus in Burlingame, California, near its Menlo Park headquarters, the Meta Store will be an interactive demo space where visitors can experiment with the US giant's Portal smart home devices and Quest 2 VR headsets as well as Ray-Ban Stories. Unlike the Portal and Quest 2 kit, the Ray-Ban-branded gear won't be sold at the Meta Store, though, and users will be directed online to purchase them. Meta also announced the addition of a Shop tab on its meta.com website. 

The Meta Store, and its showcasing of VR equipment, follows the Facebook parent blowing billions of dollars on developing metaverse-related virtual-reality technology. Its red-ink-stained Reality Labs unit helped fuel an early-February stock slump that erased nearly two years of growth, and from which Meta has yet to recover. Meta Store head Martin Gilliard's announcement this week indicates the internet goliath is unperturbed. 

SpaceX will provide free Wi-Fi for passengers flying internationally with Hawaiian Airlines as early as next year, using its Starlink broadband satellite network.

The financial terms of this contract were not revealed, and it's the first deal of its kind SpaceX has inked with a major airline. Starlink's wireless internet service will only be available on its outbound flights across the US, Asia, and Oceania for its fleet of Airbus A330 and A321neo aircraft, as well as its upcoming Boeing 787-9s, Hawaiian Airline confirmed on Monday. 

"When we launch with Starlink we will have the best connectivity experience available in the air," Peter Ingram, president and CEO of Hawaiian Airlines, said in a statement.

Intuit is being sued in the US after a security failure at its Mailchimp email marketing business allegedly led to the theft of cryptocurrency from one or more digital wallets.

In a proposed class-action lawsuit [PDF] filed in federal court in northern California on Friday, the plaintiff – Alan Levinson of Illinois – claimed he and potentially others fell victim to a sophisticated phishing attack in which their Trezor cryptocurrency wallets were unlawfully accessed and funds siphoned.

Someone earlier stole from Mailchimp details of Trezor's mailing-list subscribers, and used this information to reach out to those users with an email engineered to trick them into installing malware designed to hijack their digital wallets. Levinson said he believes millions of dollars in crypto-coins were stolen in this attack, including $87,000 from his own wallet.

It's official. Twitter's board on Monday said it has accepted an offer from Elon Musk, the world's richest man, to purchase the micro-blogging website and take it private. 

The deal was accepted at Musk's original asking price of $54.20 per share, which Twitter said values the biz at approximately $44 billion. Bret Taylor, Twitter's independent board chair, said the board believed it was the best path forward for stockholders, and that the deal "will deliver a substantial cash premium." 

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," said Musk, who used Twitter over the weekend to mock Bill Gates for being out of shape. (Gates, for what it's worth, is apparently shorting Musk's Tesla stock.)

The first bug bounty program by America's Homeland Security has led to the discovery and disclosure of 122 vulnerabilities, 27 of which were deemed critical.

In total, more than 450 security researchers participated in the Hack DHS program and identified weaknesses in "select" external Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) systems. At the end of the hack-a-thon, the department awarded these carefully vetted bug hunters $125,600 total for finding and disclosing the flaws, which is relatively cheap considering, for instance, Google has paid out millions for similar bugs. More cash is set to come from Homeland Security, we note.

"The enthusiastic participation by the security researcher community during the first phase of Hack DHS enabled us to find and remediate critical vulnerabilities before they could be exploited," DHS Chief Information Officer Eric Hysen said in a statement. 

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