Google Inc. has stolen a march on public cloud rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure by becoming the first provider to bring Intel Corp.’s next-generation Xeon Skylake chips to its data centers.

The move follows Google’s announcement last November that it was planning to incorporate Intel’s next line of server chips into its public cloud infrastructure. Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president for cloud infrastructure, said in a blog post the company’s cloud customers would benefit from a significant performance boost for some of the most demanding applications, including data analytics, genome research, machine learning and scientific modeling.

Intel’s Xeon Skylake chips are enhanced by Intel Advanced Vector Extension that target those kinds of of workloads. Compared with previous-generation chips from the company, the Skylake extensions can double “the floating-point performance for the heaviest calculations,” Hölzle said.

Google’s blog post also reveals the company has carried out some internal tests on Intel’s new chips that show an application performance improvement of 30 percent compared with earlier generations of the Xeon chips. As such, Google claims that it now has a significant performance advantage over its main rivals, AWS and Azure.

Google forged its cloud alliance with Intel last year in an effort to boost enterprise cloud adoption. At the time, the company said the Xeon Skylake AVX-512 extensions would also help with the optimization of enterprise and High-Performance Computing workloads. Hölzle explained that the Xeon Skylake chips used in Google’s data centers had been customized for the company’s virtual machine instances, with options ranging from standard to “custom machine types” that deliver better performance.

Google is making the Xeon Skylake processors available in five of its public cloud regions, including all three in the U.S. plus its eastern Asian Pacific and Western Europe regions.

Google’s cloud users will likely enjoy a significant advantage over AWS and Azure users for some weeks, but perhaps not more than that. Last year, AWS said it is expecting to add Skylake-powered C5 instances sometime in early 2017, but that’s yet to happen. Microsoft hasn’t yet said when it intends to upgrade its infrastructure to Skylake, but a report from AnandTech says the company could introduce the chips in its next-generation Open Compute servers that were announced in November under the codename Project Olympus.

The performance boost comes days after a report published by benchmark testing specialist Cloud Spectator, which claimed that Google’s public cloud ranks ahead of AWS and Azure in terms of overall “price-performance value.” However, the test also found that Google’s cloud trails several smaller vendors, including 1and1, CenturyLink and Digital Ocean, when it comes to block storage, memory and virtual central processor unit performance.

In the same report, Cloud Spectator also bemoaned a “lack of transparency” regarding public cloud infrastructure performance in the industry. It warned that some enterprises view cloud computing as a “commodity, differentiated mostly by services” when the reality is that the performance of each public cloud impacts each user differently, involving “everything from the physical hardware, to the cost of the virtualized resources.”

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