Intel's Skylake generally available on Google Compute Engine
Google Cloud is making Intel's Skylake processors generally available for Compute Engine, the company announced Wednesday. It's available in three Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions -- Western US, Western Europe, and Eastern Asia Pacific -- with support for additional regions and zones coming soon.
Google first offered Skylake for Compute Engine in February, making it the only public cloud provider to do so. For the next 60 days, Google is offering Skylake VMs at no additional cost. After that, they'll be priced at a 6 percent to 10 percent premium, depending on the specific machine configuration. "Given the significant performance increase over previous generations of Intel processors, this continues our record of providing a leading price-performance cloud computing platform," Google explained in a blog post.
Compute Engine is getting a handful of other updates, including a new Minimum CPU Platform feature that enables customers to select a specific CPU platform for VMs in a specific zone. Once selected, Compute Engine will always schedule VMs to that CPU family or above. Along with Skylake, GCP regions and zones are equipped with Intel CPUs including Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell and Broadwell.
Additionally, Google is offering extended memory for Compute Engine, removing memory ratio restrictions (previously set at 6.5GB) for a vCPU, for a maximum of 455GB of memory per VM instance.
Google also announced that Broadwell CPUs are available in all regions, as is support for VMs up to 64 vCPUs in size.