Google Cloud Platform has become the first cloud provider to offer access to Intel Skylake-EP. Skylake-EP is the next-generation architecture from Intel. We have continually discussed how Amazon and Google get CPUs well before the general public. We do not expect Skylake-EP platforms to be available before Q3 2017. What this means is that Google is leveraging its purchasing power so that it can offer chips about 1/3 of a generation before the general public can purchase them. We have little doubt that other large providers will follow suit.
Google Skylake-EP Announcement
We will note that you need to sign up for special access to be able to get on these machines so they are not general purpose on-demand instances like we saw lanched with the NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU compute instances recently. Here are a few excerpts from the blog post on the article:
…Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the first cloud provider to offer the next generation Intel Xeon processor, codenamed Skylake…
Skylake includes Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX-512), which make it ideal for scientific modeling, genomic research, 3D rendering, data analytics and engineering simulations. When compared to previous generations, Skylake’s AVX-512 doubles the floating-point performance for the heaviest calculations…
We optimized Skylake for Google Compute Engine’s complete family of VMs — standard, highmem, highcpu and Custom Machine Types to help bring the next generation of high performance compute instances to everyone…
Skylake processors are available in five GCP regions: Western US, Eastern US, Central US, Western Europe and Eastern Asia Pacific. Sign up here to take advantage of the new Skylake processors.
(Source: Google)
Google and Intel have been seen to forge closer ties as we saw the companies present at Intel AI Day 2016 where Skylake-EP was confirmed to be shipping.
Well, the commodity server market was great while it lasted. May it rest in peace.