Today, Google Cloud announced the forthcoming public preview of its Computing Engine N2 machine family that is powered by 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (code-named “Ice Lake”). Google Cloud’s N2 virtual machines (VMs) offer 30 percent better price-performance1 for a wide variety of workloads compared with the previous generation.
Read the full announcement on Google Cloud’s blog.
N2 VMs offer flexible sizing with balanced performance and cost savings for workloads such as web and app serving, enterprise applications, medium-to-large databases, caching, media transcoding streaming and gaming servers.
The newest Google Cloud N2 Machine Family utilizes many of the artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto acceleration engines featured in 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors to boost overall performance, including:
- Intel® Crypto Acceleration engines enhance data protection and privacy by increasing the performance of encryption-intensive workloads, including SSL web serving, 5G infrastructure and VPN/firewalls, while reducing the performance impact of pervasive encryption.
- Intel® Deep Learning Boost (Intel® DL Boost) provides flexibility to run complex AI workloads on the central processing unit and enhance inference performance by maximizing use of compute resources, improving cache utilization and reducing potential bandwidth bottlenecks.
- Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) boost performance and throughput for the most demanding computational tasks in applications, such as modeling and simulation, data analytics and machine learning, data compression, visualization and digital content creation.
Preview access of the latest N2 VM with 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors will be available early in the fourth quarter of 2021. Please contact your Google Cloud sales representative to get started.