C3 VMs

Google Cloud launched a new virtual machine family: C3, dubbed as the first VM in the public cloud to run on the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and the custom Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) that Google co-designed with Intel.

The C3 machine instances feature a System on a Chip (SoC) architecture and use offload hardware for more predictable and efficient compute, high-performance storage, and a programmable packet processing capability for low latency and accelerated, secure networking.

“Customers such as Snap, for example, have seen approximately a 20 percent increase in performance for a key workload over the previous generation C2.,” said Nirav Mehta, senior director of product management for Google Cloud Infrastructure Solutions in a blog post.

The SoC hardware architecture introduced in C3 VMs enables better security, isolation, and performance.

In the future, the purpose-built architecture will allow Google Cloud to offer a richer product portfolio, such as support for native bare-metal instances.