Google Cloud today is rolling out their N4D compute instances that are optimized for cost/price-performance and geared for general purpose workloads. The N4D instances are powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin” processors and offer very nice performance and value over their prior-generation general purpose VMs.

Google Cloud kindly offered Phoronix gratis access in advance of today’s launch to try out the N4D instances. The N4D instances are using AMD EPYC 9B45 processors as their custom AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” SKU.

The performance of Google’s N4D was compared to their prior generation N2D instance type. There wasn’t any Google Cloud “N3D” type and this jump from N2D to N4D ends up meaning going from AMD EPYC 7B13 “Milan” to EPYC 9B45 “Turin” as a rather significant jump past the 4th Gen EPYC “Genoa” family. It was with 4th Gen EPYC where AVX-512 was rolled out, DDR5 memory, and other significant improvements that in turn make this N2D to N4D jump even more significant.

For gauging the performance of the Google Cloud N4D instances I compared n2d-standard-32 to n4d-standard-32 with each type offering 16 physical cores / 32 threads and 128GB of RAM. Ubuntu 25.10 with the Linux 6.17 kernel and GCC 15.2 was used for testing both VMs in order to provide a very leading-edge Linux software stack.