The Azure NMads MA35D-Series virtual machines (VM) are now in public preview in the East US region. This VM series is Azure's first SKU to offer specialized hardware (Xilinx MA35D “Supernova”) accelerated VM optimized for batch and real-time video transcoding workloads. It offers 1 ASIC video processing unit (VPU) with 8GB of memory in addition to 16 vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, 76GB of temporary storage, and 4Gbps of network bandwidth.
Compared with existing general-purpose CPU or GPU based solutions, the NMads MA35D-Series VM SKU provides much higher throughout and lower latency while maintaining a significantly lower TCO for customers. NMv1 presents a huge opportunity to save on infrastructure costs and improve performance and efficiency on video transcoding. Additionally, the SKU provides access to modern codecs such as AV1 to further improve efficiency for video processing. It is the ideal choice for running your video transcoding workloads on the cloud.
Read the blog announcement.