Google Cloud has shown off its latest general-purpose virtual machine designed with performance in mind and housing some of the latest and most powerful hardware around.
Key to the C3 machine series is the 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processor, otherwise known as Sapphire Rapids, which became available earlier this year after more than a year of pushbacks.
Underlining the entire update is the promise of a 25% average increase in price-performance, with the most notable effect coming from web-based applications like NGINX.
New Google Cloud C3 machine series
Equipped with DDR5 memory, which promises to be 50% quicker than DDR4, C3 VMs are available with up to 176 vCPUs. At launch, customers will be able to select the highcpu configuration which boasts 2GB/vCPU, however Standard (4GB/vCPU) and highmem (8GB/vCPU) are set to become available “in the coming months.”
Beyond this, up to 12TB of local SSD is hoped to arrive soon, though one thing customers won’t have to join the queue for is up to 200 Gbps low-latency networking, which Google says is twice as quick as the C2.
The latest-generation Hyperdisk block storage for the C3 also looks to be able to deliver 4x higher storage throughput and 10x higher IOPS versus the outgoing generation.
“C3 continues to raise the bar on seamless maintenance, leveraging a variety of technologies that allow Google to update software and firmware without disrupting customer workloads while keeping the infrastructure updated and secure," a Google blog post written by Google Compute Engine Director of Product Management, Salil Suri, and Product Manager, Foster Casterline said.
Availability for C3 VMs is currently set for us-central1 (Iowa), us-east1 (S. Carolina), us-east4 (North Virginia), europe-west1 (Belgium), europe-west4 (Netherlands), and asia-southeast1 (Singapore).
Speaking to TechRadar Pro, a Google spokesperson highlighted that C3 pricing is equivalent to that of C2, stressing the price-per-performance improvements over the previous generation. Full details can be found on the company's website.
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