Benchmarking The AMD EPYC 9V64H: Azure HBv5's Custom AMD CPU With HBM3
The Azure HBv5 VM also performed very well for digital signal processing (DSP) and other tasks.
Benchmarking the Azure HBv5 performance was very exciting and consistently exceeding my expectations. With a year since announcement and in that time mostly dealing with EPYC Turin / Zen 5 testing, the EPYC 9V64H performance was hitting HPC workloads out of the ballpark with the generational gains and relative to my high expectations.
The WRF weather forecasting model was yet another HPC workload boasting earth-shattering generational performance gains for Microsoft Azure thanks to the EPYC EPYC 9V64H with HBM3 memory.
The BRL-CAD open-source CAD software was also showcasing the terrific capabilities of the Azure HBv5 series over HBv4.
While it's a bit of a letdown taking until late 2025 for the Azure HBv5 series to reach GA and being based on Zen 4 rather than Zen 5, once testing the Azure HBv5 series my interest was reignited and delivering crushing generational gains even over the Genoa-X-powered HBv4 series. The Microsoft Azure HBv5 series is incredibly potent for memory-intensive HPC applications thanks to its insane 6.9TB/s of memory bandwidth.
Thanks to Microsoft for providing early access to the HBv5 virtual machines for testing at Phoronix. Follow-up articles will be looking at HBv5 performance all the way back to HBv2 as well as seeing how HBv5 compares to AMD EPYC Turin bare metal hardware with DDR5 memory. There weren't any Zen 5 / Turin comparison points today as locally I just have the single Turin 2P server that is currently busy carrying out benchmarks for other articles. And unlike some other outlets, I prefer conducting fresh data each time for ensuring a 1:1 comparison rather than just comparing against old data. But once that Turin 2P server frees up in the next week or two, it will be very intriguing to see how Zen 4 + HBM3 compares to Zen 5 + DDR5-6400.
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