Google Cloud Announces Beta-Based Version of AMD EPYC-Based Compute Engine Family 

Feb. 19, 2020 -- Google Cloud announced a new AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family. Catherine Vallejo, GCE Product Manager, at Google Cloud made the announcement via a blog posted below. Vallejo notes that the EPYC family of processors are in beta version and details how the N2D VMs are considered a good option for general-purpose workloads and high-memory bandwidth workloads.

At Google Cloud, we want you to be able to choose the best VMs for your workloads. Today, we’re excited to announce a new addition to our general purpose VMs: the N2D family, built atop 2nd Gen AMD EPYC Processors.

N2D VMs are a great option for both general-purpose workloads and workloads that require high memory bandwidth.

• General-purpose workloads that require a balance of compute and memory, like web applications and databases, can benefit from N2D’s performance,  price, and features. N2D VMs are designed to provide you with the same features as N2 VMs including local SSD, custom machine types, and transparent maintenance through live migration, while features like large machine types with up to an industry-leading 224 vCPUs, the largest general purpose VM on Compute Engine. At the same time, N2D instances provide savings of up to 13% over comparable N-series instances, and up to a 39% performance improvement on the Coremark benchmark compared to comparable N1 instances1.
• HPC workloads such as crash analysis, financial modeling, rendering and reservoir analysis, will benefit from the N2D machine types configured with 128 and 224 vCPUs, which offer up to 70% higher platform memory bandwidth than comparable N1 instances. This, combined with higher core counts, provides over a 100% performance improvement on a variety of representative benchmarks, including Gromacs and NAMD, compared to n1-standard-96 vCPUs.

N2D machine type details

N2D VMs are now available in beta from us-central1, asia-southeast1, and europe-west4, with more regions on the way! You can launch them on-demand or as preemptible VMs. When you sign up for committed use discounts, you can save up to 55% for three-year commitments versus on-demand pricing. Long-running N2D VMs can take advantage of sustained use discounts, and automatically save up to 20%. You can also configure N2D VMs as predefined machine types with vCPU to memory ratios of 1:1, 1:4, and 1:8,  up to 224 vCPUs. You can also create custom machine types with N2Ds, helping you meet the needs of diverse workloads.

Get started

It’s easy to get started with N2D VMs—simply visit the Google Cloud Console and launch one! To learn more about N2D VMs or other Compute Engine VM options, check out our machine types and our pricing pages.

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