Google Cloud Platform uses unannounced Skylake-Xeons with avx-512

Google claims to be the first cloud provider with a new generation of Intel Xeon processors based on the Skylake architecture. The processors support avx-512. Intel hasn’t announced any Xeon chips that have this yet, but it’s likely to be Skylake-EP.

Google Cloud Platform customers in the US, Europe and Asia can use the Skylake processors with avx-512, Google reports. According to the company, the chips provide double the floating point performance of the previous generation Xeons and are therefore suitable for simulations, genome research, 3D rendering and data analysis. According to Intel, the processors are optimized for the virtual machines of Google’s Compute Engine, but it is not clear what the optimizations consist of.

Intel announced avx-512 in 2013. The instruction set supports eight double precision or sixteen single precision floating point numbers in the 512-bit vectors. Until now, only the Xeon Phi accelerator codenamed Knights Landing supported the instruction set.

It is already known that Intel will release the Skylake EP/EX generation with avx-512 in mid-2017. Chips from that generation, codenamed Purley, will be released under a Xeon E5-26xx v5 name. According to recent rumors, there will be a version with 32 cores, although previous roadmaps mentioned a maximum of 28 cores. The chips have to compete with AMD’s Naples processors. The most powerful chip also gets 32 cores.