GCP – Now GA: C4 VMs with Local SSD, bare metal, and larger shapes, on Intel Xeon 6
We’re thrilled to announce a significant expansion of our C4 virtual machine series, with the general availability of 28 powerful new shapes. This expansion introduces C4 shapes with Google’s next-gen Titanium Local SSD, C4 bare metal instances, and new extra-large shapes, all powered by the latest Intel Xeon 6 processors, Granite Rapids. We’re excited to be the first leading hyperscaler to bring Xeon 6 to customers.
C4 VMs with Xeon 6 deliver performance gains of up to 30% for general compute and up to 60% for ML recommendation workloads, and up to 35% lower access latency on Titanium Local SSD shapes. If you already use the C4 machine series, this means an easy and powerful path to the latest hardware without needing to migrate to a new machine series. You can take advantage of your existing committed use discounts (CUDs) and enjoy capabilities like managed instance groups and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) custom compute classes.
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C4 VMs on Intel Xeon 6
Initially launched with Intel 5th generation Xeon processors (Emerald Rapids), C4 VMs provided advancements in performance and control for enterprise and mission-critical workloads, especially AI, gaming, databases, and data analytics. And now with Xeon 6 (Granite Rapids), C4 VMs power even more demanding workloads, delivering the highest frequency of any Google Compute Engine VM — up to 4.2 GHz, the most vCPU and RAM of any Intel-based comparable product, larger L3 cache size, and 1.35x higher maximum memory bandwidth. The C4 machine series offers enhanced maintenance controls with a 30-day uptime window between planned maintenance events, and scalable Hyperdisk storage with up to 500k IOPS and 10 GB/s, including features like Hyperdisk Storage Pools.
Inference workloads on C4 with Xeon 6 demonstrate up to 60% better performance per core compared to prior-generation C3. C4’s new shapes support FP16-trained models with Intel AMX-FP16, making it a great choice for accelerating machine learning inference. Also, a new larger half- and full-host C4 shape (144 and 288 vCPU) guarantees memory isolation, for highly predictable performance. The largest C4 shape enables up to 30% more performance per core on the estimated SPECrate®2017_int_base benchmark versus C3.
“SAS® Viya®, our cloud-based data and AI platform, is optimized for productivity with Intel hardware. We’re eager to scale production on C4 with Granite Rapids, having measured up to 20% performance improvement in areas such as deep learning and synthetic data generation. C4 with Granite Rapids leveraging Intel AMX delivers up to 6x speed-up, achieving GPU-comparable performance for a wide range of generative AI use cases involving inference with small to mid-size models. This empowers customers to use SAS Viya in Google Cloud in a more cost-effective way.” – Craig Rubendall, Vice President, Applied Architecture and Technology, SAS
“As a next-generation visual effects studio, beloFX demands peak performance for complex renders. When testing C4 on Granite Rapids, we observed an impressive 50% speedup against our n2d-standard-128 and n2-standard-128 nodes. This significant boost lets us produce more groundbreaking visual effects, faster, truly supercharging our ability to innovate.” – Christoph Ammann, Global Technology Supervisor, beloFX
New C4 standard, highmem, and highcpu with 144 and 288 vCPU shapes are powered exclusively by Xeon 6:
|
Machine Type |
||
|
highcpu |
standard |
highmem |
|
C4-highcpu-144 |
C4-standard-144 |
C4-highmem-144 |
|
C4-highcpu-288 |
C4-standard-288 |
C4-highmem-288 |
Turbocharge your storage with Titanium Local SSD
We’re also excited to announce Local SSD support for C4 VMs, available with new -lssd machine types, exclusively on Xeon 6 processors. These new local SSD shapes leverage the latest Titanium SSDs, delivering impressive I/O performance for workloads like high-performance databases (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB, SQL Server tempDB and pagefile workloads), big data processing (e.g., Spark, Hadoop), media rendering and transcoding, and caching layers.
C4-lssd offers up to 7.2M max read IOPS, more than three times higher than comparable options from other leading hyperscalers. This translates to dramatic improvements in read/write latency. Titanium SSDs on C4 enable up to 35% lower access latency compared to previous generation SSDs.
“For financial market infrastructure, every microsecond of latency matters. With C4-LSSD, we have seen an impressive 70% improvement in write latency compared to previous generations. This reduction with Titanium SSDs on C4 is crucial for our demanding, high-throughput applications, ensuring the stability and responsiveness essential for our business.” – Christian Hellmann, DevOps Engineer, Deutsche Börse Group
C4 with Local SSD is available in standard and highmem configurations starting from 4 vCPUs, exclusively on Xeon 6:
|
Machine Type |
Local SSD Capacity (GiB) |
|
|
standard |
highmem |
|
|
C4-standard-4-lssd C4-standard-8-lssd C4-standard-16-lssd C4-standard-24-lssd C4-standard-32-lssd C4-standard-48-lssd C4-standard-96-lssd C4-standard-192-lssd C4-standard-144-lssd C4-standard-288-lssd |
C4-highmem-4-lssd C4-highmem-8-lssd C4-highmem-16-lssd C4-highmem-24-lssd C4-highmem-32-lssd C4-highmem-48-lssd C4-highmem-96-lssd C4-highmem-192-lssd C4-highmem-144-lssd C4-highmem-288-lssd |
375 375 750 1,500 1,875 3,000 6,000 9,000 12,000 18,000 |
Unlock direct access with C4 bare metal shapes
For workloads that demand direct access to CPU and memory resources, we’re introducing C4 bare metal shapes. These instances are ideal for commercial and custom hypervisors, applications not traditionally supported in virtual machines, and those with special performance monitoring or licensing requirements. C4 bare metal is SAP-certified, delivering an impressive 132,600 aSAPs — the highest of any comparable machine, providing peak performance and compliance for your critical SAP application servers.
Customers in financial services, SaaS/PaaS security, with dev/test environments, and private cloud platforms will find C4 bare metal types essential for meeting their stringent performance goals. Compared to the previous generation C3 bare metal instances, C4 bare metal offers up to a 35% performance improvement.
New C4 bare metal instances are available in standard-metal and highmem-metal, powered exclusively by Xeon 6:
|
Machine Type |
|
|
standard |
highmem |
|
C4-standard-288-metal |
C4-highmem-288-metal |
Get started with C4 on Intel Xeon 6 today
The expanded C4 machine series with Intel Xeon 6 is available today in 19 zones, with more expansion to come. Check the latest regional availability on our regions and zones page. Experience the leading performance, predictability, and control that C4 VMs deliver today! To learn more about C4 and its new capabilities, visit the C4 documentation.
“Intel and Google Cloud are shaping the future of cloud computing with the expansion of the C4 Machine Series powered by Intel Xeon 6 processors. With enhanced performance, built-in AI acceleration, and greater deployment flexibility with new and with extra-large shapes, we’re enabling customers to innovate faster and run workloads more efficiently than ever before.” – Ronak Singhal, Intel Senior Fellow, Intel
Read More for the details.
