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Comment by spo81rty | Hacker News Reader

With all the craziness of different CPUs and server configs... just makes me want to hurry up and go serverless!

That's why we didn't do this with machine types. If you don't care, you don't have to. If you care, ask for a particular CPU platform (or newer). Most people won't and probably shouldn't care, but Skylake is enough of a jump that we finally are giving people the explicit ability to choose.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

> Skylake is enough of a jump

Can you give more details about this?

Both clock-for-clock and even more strongly for applications that can take advantage of AVX-512, Skylake can be a lot faster than either Haswell/Broadwell. Like the jump from Sandybridge/Ivybridge to Haswell/Broadwell, the jump to Skylake is a big one. For now the best comparisons are going to come from independent sources like Anandtech and hopefully from customers running their actual code on Skylake and publishing the results.

I mean it is no Kaby Lake ;)

To be fair, there's also a general purpose option for both AWS and GCE. AWS has the M4 and GCE has the n1, something in the middle for either should be good enough for most applications.

No, m4 (mostly) is a specific architecture. There were things before it like m3.

I'm not saying it's hard to understand what to do when new ones come out, but for each architecture there's a new machine family. GCE has only historically provided n1-whatever and you got whatever CPU platform we had in that specific building.

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