Google Cloud N4 Series Benchmarks: Google Axion vs. Intel Xeon vs. AMD EPYC Performance
Overall there was quite some healthy competition among these Google Axion, AMD EPYC, and Intel Xeon VMs of the N4 generation.
When taking the geometric mean of the 70 performance benchmarks of these Google N4 class VMs, the AMD EPYC Turin powered VM offered the best performance overall. For the assortment of different benchmarks conducted, the AMD EPYC 9005 series powered N4D VM was 18% faster than the Axion-powered N4A, which was rather impressive considering the Axion VM had 16 physical cores to the EPYC and Xeon VMs having 8 physical cores plus HT/SMT. The Axion VM did come out about 18% faster than the Intel Xeon powered N4 instance. With the large mix of workloads tested, it ultimately comes down to what workload(s) are most important to you or your organization for which of the three Google Cloud N4 class VMs does make the most sense.
The Google Axion VM performed very well thanks to being backed by sixteen physical ARM64 cores and has shown how well ARM-based performance has evolved over the past several years. AMD EPYC Turin continues to perform very strong overall in the cloud across many workloads. The Intel Xeon instance based on the older Emerald Rapids processors picked up its wins for AMX-based workloads like Llama.cpp or when leveraging the QAT accelerator with OpenSSL and other select areas.
The Google Axion N4A 16 vCPU costs around $0.71 per hour while the AMD EPYC N4D 16 vCPU was at $0.77 per hour and then the Intel Xeon N4 at around $0.82 per hour.
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