Arm VMs on Compute

Google Cloud offers a range of Arm powered servers in Compute Engine. Arm architecture is optimized for power efficiency, and as a result the C4A machine series yields better price for performance.

Arm processors are common in standard servers due to their power efficiency as compared to x86 servers. Mobile phones and laptops are examples of devices that run on an Arm processor. With an Arm CPU's reduced instruction set, fewer instructions equals greater performance speed with lower battery and power consumption.

Google's custom Arm processor, Axion, is based on the Arm Neoverse V2 processor. The Neoverse V2 is the first V-series CPU to have Armv9 performance, power, and security enhancements. It is designed for high performance computing, machine learning, and general-purpose cloud computing.

Consider using C4A general-purpose Arm virtual machines (VMs) for any of the following purposes:

  • Run compute-intensive workloads that require the ability to scale usage quickly when needed.
  • Optimize for price-performance on Arm-compatible workloads.
  • Build on modern, open source software stacks.
  • Develop and test mobile or embedded systems which use an Arm CPU.
  • Evaluate whether your workload is suitable for an Arm CPU.

C4A machine series

C4A is the first Arm-based VM built on Google's Axion Arm64-based CPU. C4A offers machine types with up to 72 vCPUs and 576 GB of DDR5-5600 memory. C4A is available in standard, highmem, and highcpu machine types.

C4A is built on Titanium which uses network offloads and enables per VM Tier_1 networking performance of up to 100 Gbps with the gVNIC networking interface. C4A also supports the NVMe disk interface with Hyperdisk Balanced and Hyperdisk Extreme disks.

Simultaneous multithreading

For the C4A machine series, each vCPU is backed by a single core with no simultaneous multithreading (SMT). Thus, C4A VMs deliver greater performance per vCPU compared to a VM with SMT enabled. While SMT provides benefits to certain workloads, single-threaded cores are ideal for compute-intensive workloads because the processes can access the entire core instead of sharing it with other processes.

OS images

C4A VMs support public Arm-based OS images. You can also create custom images using a publicly-available Arm-based image.

Tau T2A machine series

The Tau T2A Arm machine series runs on the 64 core Ampere Altra Arm processor at 3.0 GHz all-core frequency. Tau T2A makes it possible to run workloads that run best, or exclusively, on Arm.

The Tau T2A machine series has predefined machine types of up to 48 physical cores with 4 GB of memory per vCPU. Tau T2A machine types run within a single NUMA node.

Tau T2A machine types support only the NVMe interface for storage, and Google virtual NIC (gVNIC) for networking. Virtio-Net and SCSI interfaces are not supported. All publicly-available Arm OS images are configured to use the NVMe and gVNIC interfaces. gVNIC is a network interface that is designed specifically for Compute Engine. It provides better performance and supports higher network bandwidths and throughput.

For this machine series, each vCPU is backed by a single core with no simultaneous multithreading (SMT).

Workload recommendations

The C4A machine series is an excellent choice for a wide range of scale-out and compute-intensive workloads, especially when price performance is a key concern. Consider C4A when you are deploying workloads such as the following:

  • ML data processing
  • ML inferencing and model serving
  • App serving, web serving, and game serving
  • Embedded systems development
  • Development on CI/CD on Arm
  • Video and image encoding, transcoding, and processing
  • Digital advertising exchanges and serving
  • Cache servers
  • Computational drug discovery
  • Android development
  • Autonomous or conventional automotive software development

What's next