First Intel Sapphire Rapids CPU benchmarks on a GCE C3 instance

Google Compute Engine released its C3 family of instances in Public Preview on February 6th, 2023. C3 instances feature the new Intel Sapphire Rapids 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs. And during the preview, you can get your hands on a C3 instance for free although you will still have to pay for storage and network. The regular price of a C3 with 4 vCPUs and 8GB RAM is $125.83/month. A 80GB SSD boot volume will set you back $13/month.

Sapphire Rapids is the latest generation of Intel data center CPUs. Sapphire Rapids was delayed multiple times but was finally released in early 2023. It is based on Intel's 10nm SuperFin process technology and features up to 56 cores and 112 threads. It also includes Intel's new Xe-LP integrated graphics, which is designed for data center workloads such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Sapphire Rapids will compete head to head against the AMD EPYC Genoa line of processors.

The C3 instance tested at VPSB was running on a Platinum 8481C CPU @ 2.70GHz. In Geekbench 5 tests, this 4 vCPU C3 VM got a single core score of 1237 which puts it in the top 7% of the fastest CPUs ever tested at VPSBenchmarks.

The C3 VPSBenchmarks trial results can be found on this trial page. Here is a sneak peak with the Yabs.sh results:

This preview pricing won't last for long so order it while you can from the Google Cloud Console.