Google Axion CPU Performance With The New Google Cloud N4A Instances

Written by Michael Larabel in Cloud on 27 January 2026 at 12:00 PM EST. Page 2 of 5. 12 Comments.

CP2K Molecular Dynamics benchmark with settings of Input: H20-64. N4A was the fastest.

As one would expect going from Neoverse N1 to N3 based VMs, the performance is much better with the new Google Cloud N4A instance. Even with the higher hourly rate of N4A vs. T2A, the new Axion-powered N4A instance was delivering much better value in this compute heavy workload.

LAMMPS Molecular Dynamics Simulator benchmark with settings of Model: 20k Atoms. N4A was the fastest.

Across other compute intensive workloads the Google Cloud N4A instance was delivering much greater performance and value than the Ampere Altra powered Google Cloud T2A prior-generation instances.

7-Zip Compression benchmark with settings of Test: Decompression Rating. N4A was the fastest.

Stockfish benchmark with settings of Chess Benchmark. N4A was the fastest.

Very solid gains for better ARM performance in Google Cloud over the past three years.

Timed Godot Game Engine Compilation benchmark with settings of Time To Compile. N4A was the fastest.

Timed Linux Kernel Compilation benchmark with settings of Build: defconfig. N4A was the fastest.

Timed LLVM Compilation benchmark with settings of Build System: Ninja. N4A was the fastest.

Timed Node.js Compilation benchmark with settings of Time To Compile. N4A was the fastest.

For those considering Google Cloud N4A instances for CI/CD build farm type scenarios or other testing with frequent code compilation, the build speeds were much faster here on N4A than T2A (Neoverse N1). Very nice improvements going from Neoverse N1 to N3 based VMs and much greater value too.

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