In a significant move, Microsoft has made its own Arm-based hardware, Cobalt 100, generally available on its Azure cloud platform. This development marks a major milestone in the company's efforts to reduce costs and increase efficiency in its massive data centers.

The Cobalt processors, based on Arm's Neoverse architecture, offer a two-times performance boost for .NET applications and a 50% price/performance improvement over previous Arm hardware generations. With lower power consumption and higher density, these servers are expected to be deployed widely across Azure regions, helping Microsoft keep costs down.

This move is part of Microsoft's "end-to-end systems approach," which focuses on optimizing software and hardware for better performance. The company has already developed custom network hardware and is now pushing its own processors to support scale-out and front-end workloads.

The availability of Cobalt-based VMs on Azure is expected to benefit developers working on distributed applications, Arm-based .NET applications, and containers. The new hardware is also likely to support GitHub Actions, allowing users to build, test, package, and deploy Arm applications without leaving an Arm environment.