Azure Cobalt 100 ARM Processors Now GA — Microsoft Custom Silicon at 50% Lower Cost

Microsoft's own ARM processor (Cobalt 100, based on Neoverse N2) is now generally available across all Azure regions in Dcas_v6 and Ecas_v6 instance families. Cobalt 100 delivers 40% better price-performance than equivalent Dsv5 Intel instances and 15% better than Ampere Altra-based Dpsv5 for cloud-native workloads.

Pricing: Dcas_v6 starts at approximately $0.077/hr for 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM — vs $0.096/hr for Ds_v5 Intel equivalent. The 20% pricing advantage combined with 40% better performance results in approximately 50% better total price-performance. All standard D-series features apply: ephemeral OS disks, Premium SSD support, accelerated networking.

TCOIQ Action: For new Linux Kubernetes workloads on Azure, default to Dcas_v6 nodes. For existing Dpsv5 clusters, evaluate Cobalt 100 for 15% additional saving. Run your container workload benchmarks first — Cobalt 100 is ARM-only and Windows is not supported.