Intel Sapphire Rapids Performance With Google Cloud Compute Engine C3

Considering that Google Cloud is predominantly Cascade Lake based on the Intel side until hitting the higher vCPU configurations where there are Ice Lake processors, there is very significant uplift going to the C3 series with Sapphire Rapids. With LC0's BLAS chess benchmark, the c3-highcpu-8 was 40% faster than the next fastest 8 vCPU configuration tested: the c2-standard-8. Again, all instances tested were sized the same, running the same Ubuntu Linux release, and in the case of the Sapphire Rapids CPU wasn't making use of any accelerators in this testing.

With the current listed pricing for the c3-highcpu series and other tested VMs, the Sapphire Rapids instance was delivering much better performance-per-dollar based on the published hourly rate for all the instances.

The 40% uplift seen in the first benchmark quickly proved itself to be about normal for the difference going from Google Cloud's all common Cascade Lake instance types up to the new Sapphire Rapids C3 series.

With current hourly pricing, the C3 Sapphire Rapids instances proved themselves to be quite attractive options in the Google Cloud.