Google (News - Alert) Cloud has announced a new partnership with semiconductor giant AMD to introduce a new line of “virtual machines”, specifically designed to boost performance and mitigate workloads within the cloud.

These new machines, named “Tau”, take a particular aim at scale-out applications, allowing developers to utilize virtual CPUs to improve both operational and economical performance for application development. Google and AMD (News - Alert) hope to steer competition away from more expensive options, such as Amazon Web Service's Graviton processors.

"A thing that is particularly important for our customers is that we are able to deliver that price-performance improvement without a redesign of the application," commented Google Cloud VP of Infrastructure, Sachin Gupta. "Until now, the message they heard was, if you want something for scale-out, first you have to go do some surgery in your application, re-tune it, and maintain two stacks for your environment,"

Tau virtual machines are reportedly, according to Google’s own testing, able to boost raw performance by 56% percent, and are 42% more economically efficient when compared to Amazon’s Graviton and other leading competition. The virtual machines are currently being incorporated into the workflow of leading social media companies including Snapchat and Twitter (News - Alert), with both companies reporting success when used in combination with Google’s Kubernetes Engine.

Google expects to officially launch Tau during the third quarter of 2021.