Google Cloud is super keen to keep certain customers on pricey Intel VMs

Google Cloud really, really wants enterprises to keep using its Intel-powered virtual machines. This week it unveiled a “white-glove” service to convince customers the silicon is worth paying extra for. It's no secret Google Cloud's Intel-based instances come at a premium over those using AMD Epyc or Ampere’s Altra CPU cores. …

[Piro]

Avx512 on Zen 4

Is still avx256 on the back-end, as I understand it. But if it can keep the clocks high, the difference might be small.

[FIA]

Re: Avx512 on Zen 4

Also, AVX512 is available in all Zen 4, not just the server stuff. (IIRC intel don't have any desktop CPUs with it enabled yet?)

[msroadkill]

IE., Google's Xeon instance infrastructure are now a tough sell.

To extract more instance value, this marketing exercise selectively identifies clients who can use helpful Intel/google expertise.

[danky]

compute time is not the cost driver

The cost of those intel chips is likely not the driver for the customers google is targeting. The customers' software stack that they license more than likely runs somewhere around 2-20 times more than the cost of a compute core. So what might seem like a very modest performance gain, at a higher price, translates into 2-20 times savings in software costs.

[l8gravely]

Re: compute time is not the cost driver

Exactly! We ran into this with Oracle. If you run on ESXi you pay a license on all the cores available in that host. So a 4 core host which costs more than a 12 core host saves us money since we don't need more than that. But god forbid you put that ESXi host into VCenter, because now Oracle wants you to pay a license based on *all* the cores in the VCenter cluster. So if you have 4 hosts with 4 cores each, you have to pay for a 12 core license, even if you only ever run your single Oracle instance on four cores.

And since VCenter 7.x can now VMotion between VCenters... you can't just put your ORacle systems into their own cluster because "hey you might move that VM somwhere else you have more cores so you gotta pay more".

Bollocks. This is why I'm trying to push people to Postrgresql as the backend if at all possible.

[jamsenbrneq]

Wow, not even google can get a hold of the Pi4 with 8gb. :) Anyway, this is the future of cluster computing as the power consumption is halved and it scales so well, meaning better profit margins for a IaaS like Google Cloud