
Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake - rey12rey
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/Google-Cloud-Platform-is-the-first-cloud-provider-to-offer-Intel-Skylake.html
======
timdorr
Just for reference, since you don't choose your processor explicitly on GCP,
but instead choose your zone with homogenous processors, here is their current
processor/zone layout: [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-
zones/regions-...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-
zones/regions-zones#available)

Since some GCP engineers are watching: Presumably we'll see some new zones to
provide these processors, or will it be a limited release within existing
zones? And if so, will you be moving away from homogenous zones in the future?

~~~
ajaimk
Bothers me a bit with "32 cores" listed when they are 16 core/32 Thread
machines.

~~~
boulos
I try to consistently say "vCPUs", but yeah...

~~~
wlamond
Given the marketing toward HPC tasks, shouldn't hyper-threading be disabled?

~~~
boulos
No? We make sure that pairs of vCPUs (hypertwins) stay together. If you'd
like, you can offline your threads in the guest for a fairly similar outcome.
Some of us regret that we sell an n1-standard-1 and the shared core machine
types, but it's pretty nice to have a $5/month VM price point for those that
want it. Most folks doing serious numerical computing end up using much larger
VMs, and always crossing NUMA nodes (which is a much larger impact).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and historically focused solely on Compute
Engine).

~~~
Shakahs
I'm curious, what is there to regret about having a shared core machine type?
Some people have a use for them and appreciate the cost savings.

------
zbjornson
I've been benchmarking these against Haswell and Broadwells. Despite being 300
MHz slower, we're getting between 5 and 45% faster benchmarks on linear
algebra functions that we run a lot, even without doing much work to tailor to
AVX512 instructions yet.

The cache is also a whopping 56 MB.

~~~
eloff
Still limited to a measly 208gb of RAM? That was pretty good back in the day,
but now my desktop workstation has 128gb. AWS offers up to 488gb on their
latest R4 instances, and 2tb on their X1 instances released a year ago.

~~~
crypt1d
damn. out of curiosity, what do u use that much ram for?

~~~
warent
I honestly can't think of any viable purpose for that much RAM unless there's
a huge amount of waste happening

~~~
jsmthrowaway
How hard are you thinking? I can think of numerous scenarios where an entire
working set being in RAM is useful and occasionally essential, and it is quite
common as an optimization in _several_ industries. Finance comes to mind (kdb+
is _designed_ to weaponize tons of RAM), as does high-scale Web operations.
This is part of why solid state NVMe devices are compelling, too, to help
bridge the gap, but it sounds like not for your purposes.

Even on the less complicated end, some years ago throwing a shitload of page
cache at MongoDB was the only way to maintain high write loads, and eventually
one reached a point where one _had_ to keep an entire shard in cache. That
bottom end threshold is lower than you think. I don't know if that's changed.

~~~
warent
I could be wrong but it really sounds like you're talking about production. If
that's the case then yes, I can respect the RAM requirement and it's almost
too obvious to state that it isn't purposeless.

The key here is it's a personal development workstation on which he has these
resources. If that's a requirement, I would argue there's something
fundamentally wrong with his development processes requiring that much data
locally without even a server.

------
boulos
It's been awesome to see our Skylakes rolling in over the past several weeks.
I personally have been waiting nearly _10_ years for AVX-512 ever since
playing with LRBni.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and helped a bit in our Skylake work).

~~~
seehafer
Please relay back to your team that the moment you get Postgres for your Cloud
SQL product you'll get a lot of AWS converts.

~~~
rattray
Out of curiosity, why would you prefer Google Cloud to AWS?

~~~
briankereszturi
Managed Kubernetes.

~~~
eblanshey
What's the difference between using Kubernetes on GCP and running Kubernetes
on a node on AWS EC2? By "managed" do you just mean I don't need to manage the
lead node?

Just getting into Kubernetes :)

~~~
briankereszturi
That's correct. The master nodes are managed by GCP and upgrades to the
kubernetes system are trivial.

------
boulos
There are a few threads asking about various features (SGX, TSX, etc.) so I
want to make a top-level comment: we're not ready to share more today (sorry).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
It's okay you're not ready to share more _today_ , but do you know/have an
idea of when you will be?

------
jscipione
Why is it important to offer Intel Skylake on cloud platforms? Is there some
specific processor extensions present in Skylake that make them particularly
compelling in a cloud environment for a particular industry or a particular
set of needs?

~~~
en4bz
MPX (hardware bounds checking)

SGX (secure enclaves)

TSX (Hardware Transactional Memory)

SGX can store SSL keys in a hardware protected enclave that can't be accessed
by hypervisors/AMT so that can be useful for security sensitive stuff.

Cloudflare probably could have used MPX to prevent their recent leak with
minimal performance overhead.

TSX is cool.

~~~
mrb
Wasn't TSX completely disabled in all Intel processors because of silicon
bugs? If it is enabled in the Skylake E5 Xeon series that Google is rolling
out, does it mean the Skylake E5 Xeons are the first processors to have a
_working_ TSX implementation?

~~~
rincebrain
AIUI that was just certain flavors of Broadwell and possibly all (or maybe
just all-released-at-the-time) Haswell chips, so later Broadwell steppings had
a working TSX implementation.

(As an example, my Xeon D-1540, a Broadwell-family chip, advertises the TSX
bits in CPU feature flags, so it's not errata'd off there.)

------
Johnny555
Amazon's c5 (Skylake) series shouldn't be far behind...

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/11/coming-
so...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/11/coming-soon-amazon-
ec2-c5-instances-the-next-generation-of-compute-optimized-instances/)

------
qhwudbebd
Any sign of IPv6 support on the horizon? Slightly embarrassing in 2017...

~~~
compuguy
Honestly Amazon EC2 _just_ got VPC's with IPv6. My ISP still doesn't have
native IPv6 either.

------
jhgg
I wonder if Skylake would offer a material improvement for our workload. We
don't necessarily use AVX-512, but we do use a heck of a lot of CPU resources
on the current architecture. We are a python/elixir shop.

Great job GCP team!

------
youdontknowtho
Did Intel actually enable the TSX extensions in Skylake? If I'm not mistaken,
they shipped it in the last couple of generations but disabled it after
release. (Something like that?)

It's something that I've wanted to play with for sometime. It's cool that GCE
has them available as a service.

~~~
flamedoge
mobile chips have them disabled I believe

~~~
blockoperation
It's available on my laptop at least:

    
    
      $ egrep '^(model name|microcode)' /proc/cpuinfo | head -n2
      model name	: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6820HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz
      microcode	: 0x9e
    
      $ egrep -o ' (hle|rtm) ' /proc/cpuinfo | head -n2
       hle
       rtm
    

This is a mobile chip and an old stepping (and running the microcode that
supposedly addresses the issue, presumably by disabling it on 'bad' chips?),
so I'd be surprised if newer chips (especially server ones) didn't have it.

~~~
flamedoge
Hmm TIL. I think newer ones had an errata (or many) and Intel decided it
wasn't worth fixing. Disappointing, but meh.. it is probably true that not
many people use Tmem on laptops.

------
tambourine_man
Constructive criticism:

Your calculator page is unusable on mobile due to fancy "material" form
filling.

[https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/)

~~~
boulos
You are too polite. I've reported this before, and I'd easily add an expletive
in front of unusable. Worse, it's not even Viewable on mobile.

~~~
dantiberian
Also, the bandwidth calculator seems to be broken, I can't add bandwidth
charges for services through the calculator.

------
lightedman
I'd rather wait for Ryzen. You won't know which Skylake processor you're
getting - the gimped one or the non-gimped one. AMD tends to keep their
features consistent across the line.

~~~
zbjornson
What do you mean by "gimped?" As in the consumer chips without AVX512 vs. the
server chips with AVX512?

~~~
lightedman
Yea, meanwhile AMD tends to keep the features across both desktop and server
lines of CPU the same.

And the pre-release Skylake server procs seems to be gimped as it's missing a
few features versus the actual official release Skylake server procs.

------
gcp
Whenever I want to try GCP, during signup I get stuck at "Account type
Business" and the need to enter a VAT number.

It hints there's Individual Accounts, but I see no way how to set it to that?

~~~
boulos
The issue is VAT in each country in the EU (which I assume you're based in).
We don't (currently) collect VAT, but as businesses are required to represent
that they'll pay it in their home countries, we can allow you to use it as a
business. It pains me (and others) deeply that we "block" individuals like
this, but that's how it is today.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

~~~
gcp
That is a weird restriction given that I can buy from the Play Store, etc. But
thanks for your response.

Back to AWS it is.

~~~
boulos
For what it's worth: which country are you in?

------
johansch
I would be quite nice if they actually advertised the particular type of CPU
core you rent, rather than some abstract unit of computation. Or at least some
kind of performance baseline.

~~~
boulos
We do! As mentioned up thread, each zone (today) has a consistent CPU
platform:

[https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-
zones/regions-...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-
zones/regions-zones#available)

For example, in us-west1-a, you're getting a 2.2 GHz base clock E5 Broadwell.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

~~~
johansch
Brilliant!

------
chillydawg
Side question: are these extensions available in the desktop (i7) parts?
Wanting to test out some optimisations for some code I have.

~~~
zbjornson
Nope, only on Xeons.

------
ctz
No mention of SGX; a major Skylake feature for cloud computing. Is it enabled?
Is it accessible?

~~~
bonzini
They use KVM, and considering that not even host support is available on
mainline Linux, I doubt so.

It would also be mentioned in the article if it were.

------
mtgx
Hopefully it will be the the first to offer the much cheaper AMD Ryzen/Naples,
too.

~~~
stuckagain
How much confidence do you have that Rev. A Ryzen parts will even work?

~~~
Cyph0n
That's a bit too extreme, don't you think? Disliking AMD is one thing, but
claiming that the _entire initial run of an AMD processor_ might be faulty is
just silly.

My guess is that you have no idea how much effort goes into verification and
testing of something as complex as a microprocessor. A significant chunk of
NRE costs goes into verification and test AFAIK.

~~~
fixermark
In fairness, there's precedent.

Though that was the FPUs in Intel processors, not AMD. So it's not very good
precedent.

~~~
Cyph0n
Intel's FDIV bug was an outlier. Besides, nowadays most of the ISA is
implemented in microcode[1]. There are two advantages to this approach: 1) it
is much easier to verify the microcode unit (it's simpler/smaller), and 2) it
allows CPU vendors to "fix" ISA implementation issues post-release by issuing
microcode updates.

[1]: ISA => microcode is equivalent in some respects to C => LLVM IR

~~~
mtanski
Outlier? I would say uncommon but not an outlier. Here's a non-exhaustive
list. [http://wiki.osdev.org/CPU_Bugs](http://wiki.osdev.org/CPU_Bugs)

There was also an issue with transaction memory with both Haswel & Broadwell.
The fix was to disable TSX support via micro code update. I wouldn't call
disabling a fix personally. I doubt Intel even compensated the folks who
bought it for the TSX support.

~~~
puzzle
Yeah, that list is far from exhaustive. Years and years ago, Google's
websearch cluster validation suite found a tricky bug that isn't on that list.
The exchange with the CPU manufacturer was amusing.

------
chaosfox
>In our own internal tests, it improved application performance by up to 30%.

this post would have been interesting if they had included those tests.

~~~
boulos
This is from our own internal workloads, including things related to Search.
If you run say specint_rate2006 (as Intel did for Haswell to Broadwell [1]),
you'll see even higher results. We just wanted to call out that even for our
own internal benchmarks, these things are seriously great (and we don't make
much use of vectorization!).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

[1]
[http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeo...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeon-e5-v4/xeon-e5-v4-enterprise-
general-compute.html)

------
nodesocket
Would a typical load balancer/web server running NGINX doing SSL termination
see an improvement switching to Skylake?

------
anonymousDan
+1 for SGX support. Would be really cool to remotely attest the software you
are running in a real-world cloud.

------
kierank
Are these E5-skylakes?

~~~
boulos
"Yes", most systems are Google, including those in Cloud, are dual socket.
[Edit: To be clear, we're not sharing the SKU, but this is a real server-class
Xeon].

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

~~~
ppoint
Are E5 Skylakes available exclusively to Google? Can't find E5 v5 on Intel's
site: [http://ark.intel.com/#@Processors](http://ark.intel.com/#@Processors).

~~~
codinghorror
Purley is the big Skylake based server platform chipset reset for Xeon E5 and
higher so Google must have early access to it.

Skylake Xeon E3 is on the current older server chipsets..

Purley is supposed to be a significant improvement.

~~~
bonzini
E3 is not a server SKU, it's meant for workstations and it's more similar to
i7 than E5. It lacks various features including ECC RAM which, I suppose, is a
no-starter for cloud hosting. Also some virtualization capabilities are
missing, notably accelerated interrupt injection (APICv+posted interrupts).

~~~
awill
E3 does support ECC RAM. I'm running a Haswell Xeon E3-1225 with 16GB ECC RAM
as my workstation.

------
Cyph0n
Oh, so now I can't voice my opinion until I've been "in the business" for x
amount of years? Yeah, nice try.

Another commenter already brought that issue up, but thanks for pointing it
out again. I still think that it's quite silly to claim that Ryzen Rev. A may
end up being a paperweight based on a mistake that took place a decade ago.
Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

And from what I read, it seems like it was an extreme edge case, so the TLB
error was triggered only during specific workloads. Sucks to be AMD back then.

~~~
stuckagain
All I'm saying is it would be better if you knew what you were talking about.
AMD has been outsourcing verification to its customers for many years.

~~~
Cyph0n
> AMD has been outsourcing verification to its customers for many years

You have no idea what you're talking about if you think for a _second_ that a
large CPU vendor like AMD would delegate verification to "its customers". It's
like saying that Boeing just builds planes and tells airlines to make sure
they fly correctly before allowing passengers to board them.

~~~
dang
> _You have no idea what you 're talking about_

This is uncivil and not ok on HN. Please take time to edit this kind of swipe
out of your comments here.

~~~
Cyph0n
Seriously? So when I see someone on HN who I think is clearly wrong, I can't
say that? I agree that my tone could be improved, but I only said it that way
in response to the parent's tone.

Also, how was our argument a "flame war"? It only lasted for 3-4 replies, and
was quite civil in my opinion.

I tend to always agree with your decisions, but this one is a bit too extreme.

~~~
dang
It's not about "tone" but content and it's quite simple, though always harder
to see in one's own case. The HN guidelines say this:

 _When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not
3."_

Similarly, "You have no idea what you're talking about if you think for a
_second_ that a foo like bar would baz" can be shortened to, "A foo like bar
wouldn't baz."

HN's rules apply regardless of how other commenters are behaving. If they
didn't, we might as well have no rules, because it always feels like others
are behaving worse.

~~~
Cyph0n
Damn, those are some specific guidelines haha! I will make sure to dial down
my responses in the future. Thanks.

------
fabrigm
A Google day is not responsive

------
mikecb
I think it's funny that big Xeon upgrades seem to always occur approximately 8
months after big Power architecture blog posts.

------
Mo3
Hahaha. Meanwhile I've been running 2 machines with Skylake and a combined 24
cores/48 threads, 256GB DDR4, 6x512G SSDs, unmetered 1Gbit/s public and
2,5Gbit/s internal for over half a year for a combined $150 total, in complete
privacy and in full control of my hosts.. go dedicated, people.

~~~
boulos
The consumer Skylakes are not even in the same league as what we're announcing
today. The easiest analogy is comparing a laptop to a beefy two-socket server.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and of course want you to pay us to use
Skylake)

~~~
xorblurb
> want you to pay us to use Skylake

I already use a nice E3 Skylake workstation at work, thank you very much.
Could be an E5 or a big i7 with more cores (I just rechecked on ark and I
guess it's still not available publicly for Skylake, but I also guess this can
not held for very long...), but we want it to be close to our product target,
which is an E3, so E3 it is.

For tons of practical purposes, lots of reasonable E5 are comparable to what
you can get with the biggest i7 -- and during the last gen for tons of
practical purposes gen to next gen comparable CPU have only progressed
slightly. Of course there are workloads where you want to use the most insane
CPU, or some CPU with new features / better perf in some niche workload, and
so over, but when you start to have such advanced needs I doubt a little that
OTS platform solutions are better for the majority of people with highly
advanced needs...

But yeah, on the mass of people, some will remain interested by "your"
solution. Meaning mainly Intel solution, given how you advertise Skylake soo
much...

