Google Cloud C4 machine series
Recently Google cloud has announced general availability of C4 machine series which are targeted towards high performance workloads.
Link for reference: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/c4-machine-series-is-now-ga/
Below excerpt taken from the blog,
Together with the N4 machine series, C4 VMs provide the performance and flexibility you need to handle a majority of workloads, all powered by Google’s Titanium. With Titanium offload technology, C4 provides high performance connectivity with up to 200 Gbps of networking bandwidth and scalable storage with up to 500k IOPS and 10 GB/s throughput on Hyperdisk Extreme. C4 instances scale up to 192 vCPUs and 1.5TB of DDR5 memory and feature the latest generation performance with Intel’s 5th generation Xeon processors (code-named Emerald Rapids) offering predefined shapes in high-cpu, standard, and high-mem configurations.
As mentioned in google blog post
In summary from the blog,
- C4 VMs are powered by 5th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Emerald Rapids) and Titanium processors.
- Switch between core-boosting performance and steady all-core turbo performance for your vCPUs.
- Supports up to 192 vCPUs and 1.5 TB of DDR5 memory
- Supports standard network configuration with up to 100 Gbps bandwidth and Supports per VM Tier_1 networking performance with up to 200 Gbps bandwidth
- Supports Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), a built-in accelerator that significantly improves the performance of deep-learning training and inference on the CPU.
- Supports the performance monitoring unit (PMU).
Some of the components which are important to note and I will blog them later are,
- Emerald Rapids and Titanium processors
- Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX)
- Performance monitoring unit (PMU)
Details about C4 machine series are given below (data captured as of September 4th 2024)
C4 VMs are available as predefined configurations in sizes ranging from 2 vCPUs to 192 vCPUs and up to 1,488 GB of memory and classified as C4-standard, C4-highcpu and C4-highmem.
C4 standard
C4 highcpu
C4 highmem
As mentioned in their C4 machine series,
* A CPU uses two threads per core, and a vCPU represents a single thread.
‡ Default egress bandwidth can’t exceed the number given. Actual egress bandwidth depends on the destination IP address and other factors.
# Supports high-bandwidth networking for larger machine types.
Pricing for C4 instances is mentioned here, https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing#general_purpose