Machine families resource and comparison guide

This document describes the machine families, machine series, and machine types that you can choose from to create a virtual machine (VM) instance or bare metal instance with the resources that you need. For accelerator-optimized machines, this document describes only Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerators.

There are several machine families you can choose from. Each machine family is further organized into machine series and predefined machine types within each series. For example, within the N2 machine series in the general-purpose machine family, you can select the n2-standard-4 machine type.

When you create a compute instance, you select a machine type from a machine family and series. The machine type determines the resources that Compute Engine allocates to the instance. For example, the n2-standard-4 machine type creates a VM with 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory.

Compute Engine terminology

This documentation uses the following terms:

• Machine family: A curated set of processor and hardware configurations optimized for specific workloads, for example, General-purpose, Accelerator-optimized, or Memory-optimized.

• Machine series: Machine families are further classified by series, generation, and processor type. Each series focuses on a different aspect of computing power or performance. For example, the M series offers more memory, while the C series offers better performance.

• Machine type: Every machine series offers at least one machine type. Each machine type provides a set of resources for your compute instance, such as vCPUs, memory, disks, and GPUs.

Predefined machine types

Machine types come with a non-modifiable amount of memory and vCPUs. The machine types use a variety of vCPU to memory ratios:

• highcpu — from 1 to 3 GB memory per vCPU; typically, 2 GB memory per vCPU.
• standard — from 3 to 7 GB memory per vCPU; typically, 4 GB memory per vCPU.
• highmem — from 7 to 12 GB memory per vCPU; typically, 8 GB memory per vCPU.
• megamem — from 12 to 15 GB memory per vCPU; typically, 14 GB memory per vCPU.

• ultramem — from 24 to 31 GB memory per vCPU.

For example, a c3-standard-22 machine type has 22 vCPUs, and as a standard machine type, it also has 88 GB of memory.

Machine family and series recommendations

The following table provides recommendations for different workloads.

C4, C3	M3	A3
Consistently high performance for a variety of workloads	Highest memory to compute ratios for memory-intensive workloads	Optimized for accelerated high performance computing workloads
High traffic web and app servers Databases In-memory caches Ad servers Game Servers Data analytics Media streaming and transcoding CPU-based ML training and inference	Small to extra-large SAP HANA in-memory databases In-memory data stores, such as Redis Simulation High Performance databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL Electronic design automation	Generative AI models such as the following: Large Language Models (LLM) Diffusion Models Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) CUDA-enabled ML training and inference High-performance computing (HPC) Massively parallelized computation BERT natural language processing Deep learning recommendation model (DLRM) Video transcoding Remote visualization workstation

After you create a compute instance, you can use rightsizing recommendations to optimize resource utilization based on your workload. For more information, see Applying machine type recommendations for VMs.

General-purpose machine family guide

The general-purpose machine family offers several machine series with the best price-performance ratio for a variety of workloads.

Compute Engine offers general-purpose machine types that run on x86 architecture.

• The C4 machine series runs on the Intel Granite Rapids CPU platform and uses Titanium for CPU offloading. C4 machine types are optimized to deliver consistently high performance and scale up to 288 vCPUs, 2.2 TB of DDR5 memory, and 18 TiB of Local SSD. C4 is available in highcpu (2 GB memory per vCPU), standard (3.75 GB memory per vCPU), and highmem (7.75 GB memory per vCPU) configurations. C4 instances are aligned with the underlying non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture to offer optimal, reliable, and consistent performance.
• The C3 machine series offers up to 176 vCPUs and 2, 4, or 8 GB of memory per vCPU on the Intel Sapphire Rapids CPU platform and Titanium. C3 instances are aligned with the underlying NUMA architecture to offer optimal, reliable, and consistent performance.

Memory-optimized machine family guide

The memory-optimized machine family has machine series that are ideal for OLAP and OLTP SAP workloads, genomic modeling, electronic design automation, and memory-intensive HPC workloads. This family offers more memory per core than any other machine family, with up to 4 TB of memory.

M3 instances offer up to 128 vCPUs, with up to 30.5 GB of memory per vCPU, and are available on the Intel Ice Lake CPU platform.

Accelerator-optimized machine family guide

The accelerator-optimized machine family is ideal for massively parallelized Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) compute workloads, such as machine learning (ML) and high performance computing (HPC). This machine family is the optimal choice for workloads that require accelerators (GPUs).

A3 instances run on the Intel Sapphire Rapids CPU platform and use Titanium for CPU-offloading. You can create A3 instances using the following machine types:

• A3 Edge machine series

  • a3-edgegpu-8g-nolssd: 208 vCPUs, 1,872 GB of memory, 8 NVIDIA H100 GPUs attached, and 5 physical NICs

• A3 High machine series

  • a3-highgpu-1g-nolssd: 26 vCPUs, 234 GB of RAM, 1 NVIDIA H100 GPU attached, and 1 physical NIC
  • a3-highgpu-2g-nolssd: 52 vCPUs, 468 GB of RAM, 2 NVIDIA H100 GPUs attached, and 1 physical NIC
  • a3-highgpu-4g-nolssd: 104 vCPUs, 936 GB of RAM, 4 NVIDIA H100 GPUs attached, and 1 physical NIC
  • a3-highgpu-8g-nolssd: 208 vCPUs, 1,872 GB of RAM, 8 NVIDIA H100 GPUs attached, and 5 physical NICs

Machine series comparison

Use the following table to compare each machine family and determine which one is appropriate for your workload.

If, after reviewing this section, you are still unsure which family is best for your workload, start with the general-purpose machine family. For details about all supported processors, see CPU platforms.

To learn how your selection affects the performance of disk volumes attached to your compute instances, see Hyperdisk performance limits.

Compare the characteristics of different machine series. You can select specific properties in the Choose instance properties to compare field to compare those properties across all machine series in the following table.

GPUs and compute instances

GPUs are used to accelerate workloads, and are supported for A3 instances. The GPUs are automatically attached when you create the instance. A3 instances have a fixed number of GPUs and vCPUs, and a fixed amount of memory per machine type.

For more information, see GPUs on Compute Engine.

What's next

• Learn how to create and start a VM.

• Complete the Quickstart using a Linux VM.

• Complete the Quickstart using a Windows VM.

• Learn more about attaching block storage to your VMs.