New Axion C4A metal offers bare metal performance on Arm

Today, we are thrilled to announce C4A metal, our first bare metal instance running on Google Axion processors, available in preview soon. C4A metal is designed for specialized workloads that require direct hardware access and Arm®-native compatibility. 

Now, organizations running environments such as Android development, automotive simulation, CI/CD pipelines, security workloads, and custom hypervisors can run them on Google Cloud, without the performance overheads and complexity of nested virtualization.

C4A metal instances, like other Axion instances, are built on the standard Arm architecture, so your applications and operating systems compiled for Arm remain portable across your cloud, on-premises, and edge environments, protecting your development investment. C4A metal offers 96 vCPUs, 768GB of DDR5 memory, up to 100Gbps of networking bandwidth, with full support for Google Cloud Hyperdisk including Hyperdisk Balanced, Extreme, Throughput, and ML block storage options.

Google Cloud provides workload-optimized infrastructure to ensure the right resources are available for every task. C4A metal, like the Google Cloud Axion virtual machine family, is powered by Titanium, a key component for multi-tier offloads and security that is foundational to our infrastructure. Titanium’s custom-designed silicon offloads networking and storage processing to free up the CPU, and its dedicated SmartNIC manages all I/O, ensuring that Axion cores are reserved exclusively for your application’s performance. Titanium is part of Google Cloud’s vertically integrated software stack — from the custom silicon in our servers to our planet-scale network traversing 7.75 million kilometers of terrestrial and subsea fiber across 42 regions — that is engineered to maximize efficiency and provide the ultra-low latency and high bandwidth to customers at global scale.

Architectural parity for automotive workloads

Automotive customers can benefit from the Arm architecture’s performance, efficiency, and flexible design for in-vehicle systems such as infotainment and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Axion C4A metal instances enable architectural parity between test environments and production silicon, allowing automotive technology providers to validate their software on the same Arm Neoverse instruction set architecture (ISA) used in production electronic control units (ECUs). This significantly reduces the risk of late-stage integration failures. For performance-sensitive tasks, these customers can execute demanding virtual hardware-in-the-loop (vHIL) simulations with the consistent, low-latency performance of physical hardware, ensuring test results are reliable and accurate. Finally, C4A metal lets providers move beyond the constraints of a physical lab, by dynamically scaling entire test farms and transforming them from fixed capital expenses into flexible operational ones.