As part of the announcements coming out today from Google Cloud Next 2025, the embargo has now lifted on the new Google Cloud C4D VMs. Powered by AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” processors, the new C4D instances deliver incredibly high performance and can scale up to 384 vCPUs with 3TB of RAM. For web servers, databases, CPU-based machine learning, and other workloads, the new Google C4D instances deliver incredible uplift compared to the prior-gen C3D instances. Here are some of the first public, independent benchmarks of Google’s new C4D family.
Thanks to Google for providing Phoronix with early preview access to the new C4D instance type. For being able to carry out this launch-day testing, Google provided gratis/free access to the C4D instance types for performance benchmarking as well as the prior-gen C3D instances for comparison. Thanks to Google for providing this free access to be able to carry out today’s benchmarks of 5th Gen AMD EPYC in the public cloud.
Google is catering the new EPYC Turin powered instances for web servers, app serving, game servers, databases, caching servers, video streaming, data analytics, CPU-based AI/ML workloads, and more. As we’ve shown in many Phoronix articles since last year, the AMD EPYC 9005 series offers incredible performance potential. With EPYC Turin using Zen 5 CPU cores there is AVX-512 now implemented with a full 512-bit data path, DDR5-6000/6400 memory support, and a variety of other architectural improvements for delivering great uplift compared to the prior generation EPYC 9004 series. If you’ve been keeping up with your Phoronix reading and the many 5th Gen EPYC CPU benchmarks on Phoronix since last October, the new EPYC 9005 series really doesn’t need any further introduction: these are extremely capable server processors.
The new Google Cloud C4D instances scale up from 2 to 384 vCPUs using both physical cores and sibling SMT threads. The C4D instances are also available with Confidential VM support leveraging AMD SEV-SNP for those interested.
At least for the Google C4D instances I tested thus far, they were all powered by the AMD EPYC 9B45 CPU model as a custom SKU offering — similar to C3D using the AMD EPYC 9B14 processor.
For getting an idea of the C4D performance, I benchmarked the c4d-standard-32 and c4d-standard-64 instances. In an article next week will also be some flagship benchmarks of the top-end c4d-standard-384 instance. For evaluating the C4D performance I compared them to the c3d-standard-30 and c3d-standard-60 instances: unfortunately there wasn’t the same vCPU count matching between C3D and C4D, but even when accounting for the vCPU difference, these Turin-powered C4D instances deliver striking leads.
All of the C3D and C4D instances were tested using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the Linux 6.8 kernel and GCC 13.3 compiler and other OS/package defaults. Thanks again to Google for providing the free access for carrying out these C3D and C4D instances. Due to the public cloud costs otherwise and the pressure on the web ad/publishing industry, just these instances were tested for a generational look without any cross-cloud tests or similar. Those curious how Intel Xeon CPUs compete with AMD EPYC 9005 and the like can see our numerous bare metal CPU benchmarks in Phoronix reviews.
I wasn’t provided with any C4D instance pricing information in advance of today’s launch so this article is looking strictly at the generational performance from C3D to C4D instances on Google Cloud.
