Google Cloud’s new N2 Ice Lake VMs to be available in preview in Q4, 2021

Running at 2.6GHz base frequency and 3.4GHz sustained all core turbo, the new Google Cloud N2 Ice Lake VMs are claimed to offer better price-performance for a wide variety of workloads compared to VMs running 2nd Generation Intel Xeon processors.

Google Cloud's new Compute Engine N2 virtual machines (VMs) powered by the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (codenamed Ice Lake) will be available in preview in early Q4, 2021, the cloud giant said on Wednesday.

Preview access of the new virtual machines will be available in the United States (central), Europe (west) and Southeast Asia regions. Availability in additional Google Cloud regions is planned for the coming months.

Running at 2.6GHz base frequency and 3.4GHz sustained all core turbo, the new Google Cloud N2 Ice Lake VMs are claimed to offer better price-performance for a wide variety of workloads compared to VMs running 2nd Generation Intel Xeon processors.

The new N2 machines powered by the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor offer flexible sizing with up to 128 vCPUs and 864GB of memory for scale-up workloads.

"N2 VMs offer flexible sizing with balanced performance and cost savings for workloads such as web and app serving, enterprise applications, medium-to-large databases, caching, media transcoding streaming and gaming servers," Intel said in a press release.

Further, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) will support the new N2 Ice Lake VMs as soon as they are available. You can add the new VMs to your GKE clusters by choosing the N2 machine type in your GKE node pools and using the minimum CPU platform.

New larger N2 machine shapes

Additionally, Google Cloud is increasing the N2 Custom Machine Types maximum to 96 vCPUs. The new N2 machines also support 100Gbps VM networking and high-performance 9TB local SSD options and will become available as a new sole-tenant node type (128vCPU, 864GB), allowing consolidation of more general-purpose workloads on a single node.

The new Google Cloud N2 machine shapes with more than 80 vCPUs will be available exclusively with the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. Customers of existing N2 machine shapes can use the Minimum CPU Platform feature (minCPU) and select Intel Ice Lake or Later to provision their N2 VMs on the new CPU platform when they become available.