Google has announced a price reduction for GPUs attached to on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines by up to 36%.
For US regions – Oregon and South Carolina – NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 GPU attached to a VM will cost $1.46 per hour, while the K80 GPU will set users back $0.45 per hour. The P100 and K80 GPUs are also available in Belgium and Taiwan
The company added that organisations such as Shazam and oilfield services provider Schlumberger were among those taking advantage of GPUs to ‘innovate, accelerate and save money.’ Companies can utilise GPUs from Google in various ways; hardware is passed through directly to the virtual machine to focus on bare metal performance, while faster disk performance can be achieved through attaching up to 3TB of Local SSD to any GPU-enabled virtual machine.
Alongside this, Google added it was lowering the price of preemptible Local SSDs by almost 40% compared to on-demand Local SSDs – equating to $0.048 per GB-month in the US.
Google’s focus on making GPUs more affordable is good news for customers, but it’s even better news for NVIDIA. Earlier this month, the company put out a statement saying that every major cloud provider has put out cloud services based on its product. Alongside this, NVIDIA’s most recent financial results found record revenues of $2.64 billion, up 32% from this time the previous year.
“We hope that the price reduction on NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and preemptible Local SSDs unlocks new opportunities and helps you solve more interesting business, engineering and scientific problems,” wrote Chris Kleban, Google product manager in a blog post.