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back to article Core Blimey! Azure moving from physical to virtual cores

Microsoft's revealed that virtual machines in its Azure cloud will soon be defined by virtual rather than physical cores. Microsoft says the change “is a key architectural change in our VMs that enables us to unlock the full potential of the latest processors.” The post then names Intel's Broadwell E5-2673 v4 2.3 as the …

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  1. theblackhand

    Rumours

    There were rumours that early batches of Intels latest and greatest Xeons were being sucked up by a cloud provider in spite of some bugs that stopped mainstream release.

    Maybe they weren't rumours after all...

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ELI5 - What's the difference between virtual and physical cores?

    0 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Virtual cores map to threads rather than cores and are typically overprovisioned, allowing MS to shove substantially more customers onto the same kit.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        I thank you

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      2. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        vCPU = hyperthreading

        Specifically a vCPU is one hyperthreaded core. It doesn't subdivide below that, but it can generally be considered half a physical core. Microsoft Azure started on AMD, so they used only physical cores for a long time even as they switched to Intel, but the AMD stuff is probably all gone now.

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  3. Tom 64
    Windows

    What they actually mean is

    They are going to start spawning more VM cores than their physical CPUs have.

    Bit late to the party, AWS and google have been going it for a while.

    1 1 Reply
  4. ColonelClaw

    A quick Google search shows up this chip to be 20 cores/40 threads. Methinks somebody at Microsoft got their bits mixed up with their cores.

    An easy mistake to make (if you don't work in tech).

    2 0 Reply

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