Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has announced support for more powerful virtual machines, offering up to 96 vCPUs and 624GB of memory – that’s 50 percent more power than was previously available on a single Compute Engine VM.

The cores are provided by the latest Xeon SP processors, based on the Skylake microarchitecture and launched in July.

Intel says its VMs now offer more Skylake-based vCPUs than any other cloud provider – although it doesn’t actually name the specific chips it uses.

The new instances are available immediately in four GCP regions: Central US, West US, West Europe, and East Asia.

Google Compute Engine logo
Google Compute Engine logo – Google

Better, faster, stronger

Google Cloud Platform previously supported VMs with up to 64 vCPUs and 416GB of memory.

Now, the company offers 96 vCPUs as part of three standard virtual machines, with different memory footprints: 86.4GB for CPU-intensive tasks, 360GB for balanced workloads and 628GB for applications that require a lot of memory, like in-memory databases.

Incidentally, the new instances have been certified with SAP HANA – one of the most popular in-memory databases on the market.

Customers can also use custom machine types – introduced in February 2016 - to create their own set-ups, with 96 vCPUs and 624GB of memory being the upper limit.

Google says it is currently working to add even more memory to its instances, with 4TB as the new target. The company is running an early testing group, and is inviting participation from customers with especially large memory demands.