Google Cloud Technologies has announced that it is partnering with AMD for its new family of Tau Virtual Machines (VMs), available from Q3 this year (but available in preview to core customers now). The choice by Google seems like it was pretty straightforward and was outlined in a press release by AMD, and a blog post by Google's Cloud Tech division. In brief, AMD offered an irresistible combination of price (TCO), performance in customer workloads, and easy integration with its x86 compatibility.
Very excited to partner with @googlecloud on the new Tau VM family with @AMDServer 3rd Gen #EPYC! https://t.co/2byCIQahlv
— Lisa Su (@LisaSu) June 17, 2021
Above you can see AMD's CEO, Dr Lisa Su, recent winner of the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, and 'world's best CEO', is very excited by the newly announced Google partnership. It is indeed a big win for AMD in the data centre, and Google's illustrated reasoning for its choice does AMD plenty of favours.
Charts behind Google's choice of AMD 3rd gen Epyc 'Milan' processors
According to Google Cloud, the T2D instance, powering the new family of Tau VMs, "offers 56 per cent higher absolute performance and more than 40 per cent higher price performance for scale-out workloads." AMD says that the TD2 instances are offered in eight different predefined VM shapes, with up to 60 vCPUs per VM, and up to 4GB of memory per vCPU, and that this spec is ideal for scale-out workloads. Tasks that these VMs will be put to include; compute optimized, general purpose, high-performance and confidential computing.
Google Cloud customers like Twitter and Snap are already testing the new Tau VM family and are impressed / excited by the results. Further price, performance, and specific workloads are scheduled for test in the coming weeks / months.
