Tau T2D VMs now in GA : Independent testing validates market-leading price-performance

Editor’s note: Originally released to Preview in October, Tau T2D VMs became Generally Available on November 16, 2021.

In June, we announced a new virtual machine (VM) family, Tau VMs, that extends Compute Engine’s VM offerings with an option that delivers the best price-performance among leading clouds for scale-out workloads. The first member of the Tau VM family, T2D, is now available in Preview. This week, we are excited to share the results of independent testing by Phoronix, validating Google’s claims on price-performance leadership.  

Phoronix, a site devoted to Linux hardware reviews and benchmarking, put T2D to the test with its benchmark suite. The Phoronix article details the results of benchmarking vs. Graviton-based VM instances from Amazon Web Services.

“Across a wide range of tests carried out, the Google Cloud Tau VMs consistently showed great value and performance-per-dollar,” said Michael Larabel, Founder, Phoronix. The testing shows that Tau T2D VMs deliver, on average, 52% higher performance for 8 vCPU VMs and 47% higher performance for 32 vCPU VMs across a variety of tests including image processing, database, video codec, compile time, compression and cryptography. 

Tau (T2D) VMs are based on the latest 3rd Generation AMD EPYC™ processors, bringing improved price-performance for many workloads without the need to migrate away from the x86 architecture. With access to a full “Zen 3” core per vCPU plus optimizations from Google Cloud, customers will get the best possible performance for scale-out workloads. 

To read more about how Tau VMs provide significant advantages and value to customers, click here.

Google Kubernetes Engine support

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is the leading platform for organizations looking for advanced container orchestration, delivering the highest levels of reliability, security, and scalability. You can preview GKE node pools based on Tau VMs and explore how you can take advantage of improved price-performance for your scale-out containerized workloads, especially CPU-bound workloads such as web-serving with encryption, video encoding, compression/decompression, and image processing. Using Tau VMs along with GKE Cost Optimization Best Practices can help lower your total cost of ownership. You can add Tau VMs to new or existing GKE clusters by specifying the T2D machine type in your GKE node-pools.

Available now in GA (updated as of Nov 16, 2021)   

The T2D machine family is available today in GA in us-central1 (a/f), europe-west4 (a/c), asia-southeast1 (b/c) and will become available in other Google Cloud regions in the coming months, as listed on the regions and zones page.To learn more about T2D VMs or other Compute Engine VM options, check out our machine types and our pricing pages. To get started,  go to the Google Cloud Console and select T2D for your VMs.