Google Cloud Tau VM Instances Deliver Better Performance, Price-Performance Than Graviton2 M6g

Consistently we were seeing better performance and value with the Google Cloud T2D instances compared to the same size M6g instances.

Across a wide range of tests carried out, the Google Cloud Tau VMs consistently showed great value and performance-per-dollar.

Across a variety of different tests, the geometric mean of all the results put the t2d-standard-8 at 1.52x the performance of the m6g.2xlarge and the t2d-standard-32 at 1.47x the performance of the m6g.8xlarge. So while the Tau T2D VM instances cost about 10% more than the M6g on-demand pricing, these AMD EPYC 7003 series based instances consistently was showing better value across the range of benchmarks conducted thus far for TCO savings.

My independent testing aligns with what Google was promoting in their June announcement for the performance against "Vendor A"'s Arm instances and the hefty price-performance value. (See the full dataset of Graviton2 vs. T2d benchmarks via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.)

While the 32 vCPU t2d-standard-32 was the largest size tested for this comparison, Tau VM does scale all the way up to offering 60 vCPU instances for continuing to provide excellent performance with AMD EPYC Zen 3 processors. M6g Graviton2 instances do go up to 64 cores, but as should be of little surprise given these results, in initial testing carried out at the highest tiers Tau VM still was delivering superior performance across the board.

Tau VM instances are now available in Preview on GCP. Thanks to Google for providing access to these Tau VM instances for benchmarking.