Intel and Google Cloud recently announced that they have launched a co-designed infrastructure processing unit (IPU) chip called E2000 to reduce the load on the primary CPU in data centers and is capable of making the cloud workloads more secure and efficient.
“We are pleased to have co-designed the first ASIC Infrastructure Processing Unit with Google Cloud, which has now launched in the new C3 machine series. A first of its kind in any public cloud, C3 VMs will run workloads on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors while they free up programmable packet processing to the IPUs securely at line rates of 200Gb/s. This Intel and Google collaboration enables customers through infrastructure that is more secure, flexible, and performant.” – Nick McKeown, Senior Vice President, Intel Fellow, and General Manager of Network and Edge Group.
The C3 machine series
The Compute Engine C3 machine series is the first VM in the public cloud powered by the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and with Google’s custom Intel IPU. It is now available in Private Preview. C3 machine instances make use of offload hardware to offer more predictable and efficient compute, and high-performance storage. It has a programmable packet processing capability for low latency and accelerated secure networking.
C3 VMs deliver better security, isolation, and performance with the System on a Chip hardware architecture. This purpose-built architecture will also enable Google to offer a richer product portfolio, like support for native bare-metal instances, in the future.
C3 VMs with Hyperdisk are capable of delivering four times higher throughput and ten times higher input/output operations per second (IOPS). Hyperdisk is Google’s next-generation block storage. The new architecture separates compute instance sizing from storage performance. This enables delivering 80% higher IOPS per vCPU. Therefore, users will not have to choose expensive and larger compute instances to improve the storage performance for data workloads such as Hadoop and Microsoft SQL Server.
C3 VMs also have 200 Gbps low-latency networking powered by Google’s custom IPU, and line-rate encryption using the open-source PSP protocol. This enables high-performance computing workloads.
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