Taking a screen shot from my Azure Portal, you will see the available hardware configurations available for Azure SQL Database.

I wrote about Generation 4 and 5 in the past but what about F and M series? What are they and its purpose in the configuration line up?

M series, is a new memory optimized hardware option in SQL Database for workloads demanding more memory and higher compute limits than provided by Gen5.  M-series provides 29 GB per vCore and 128 vCores which increases the previous memory limit in SQL Database by 8x to nearly 4 TB. That is impressive, that is one of blockers for some workloads I have found based on Gen 5 where the vCore factor of RAM was around 5.1GB RAM per vCore. Moving to 29GB per vCore is a serious difference and when moving to Azure one of key blockers I faced was the lower RAM per core count when comparing to on-premises SQL servers.

The fsv2 series is all about compute optimised workloads to allow for delivering low CPU latency and high clock speed for the most CPU demanding workload. This is provided by Intel® 8168 (Skylake) processors ultimately with higher core turbo clock speed of 3.4 GHz and a maximum single core turbo clock speed of 3.7 GHz, compared to the base generation 5 Intel® E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell) 2.3-GHz, Intel® SP-8160 (Skylake)*, and Intel® 8272CL (Cascade Lake) 2.5 GHz* processors this is  a big difference! Now, depending where you are in the world depends if you have access to F and M series, please see the below for more details.

Fsv2-series is available in the following regions: Australia Central, Australia Central 2, Australia East, Australia Southeast, Brazil South, Canada Central, East Asia, East Us, France Central, India Central, Korea Central, Korea South, North Europe, South Africa North, Southeast Asia, UK South, UK West, West Europe, West Us 2. M-series is available in the following regions: East US, North Europe, West Europe, West US 2.