# Google Cloud C4 Brings a 70% TCO improvement on GPT OSS with Intel and Hugging Face

[Hugging Face](https://yomu.fyi/company/hugging-face) · Jiqing.Feng, Matrix Yao, Ke Ding, Ilyas Moutawwakil · Oct 16, 2025

**Type:** Benchmark

## Summary

Intel and Hugging Face benchmarked OpenAI GPT OSS text generation to evaluate performance on Google Cloud C4 virtual machines powered by Intel Xeon 6 processors against previous-generation C3 instances. The benchmark evaluated the unsloth/gpt-oss-120b-BF16 Mixture of Experts model across batch sizes from 1 to 64 using bfloat16 precision, static KV cache, and SDPA attention. To eliminate redundant computation, Hugging Face merged an optimization directing each expert sub-network to process only its routed tokens rather than all tokens. Testing demonstrated that C4 instances deliver 1.4x to 1.7x higher throughput per vCPU compared to C3 instances. At a batch size of 64, C4 achieved a 1.7x Total Cost of Ownership improvement alongside lower hourly pricing.

## Context

Evaluating text generation performance and Total Cost of Ownership improvements for OpenAI GPT OSS Mixture of Experts models when transitioning from Google Cloud C3 instances to C4 instances.

## Approach / What changed

Intel and Hugging Face merged an expert execution optimization (PR #40304) into transformers so MoE experts process only routed tokens. They benchmarked unsloth/gpt-oss-120b-BF16 on GCP C4 VMs (Intel Xeon 6) versus C3 VMs (4th Gen Intel Xeon) across batch sizes 1 to 64 with static KV cache and SDPA attention.

## Takeaways

- Hugging Face merged an MoE optimization (PR #40304) that routes only designated tokens to each expert, eliminating redundant compute and reducing wasted FLOPs.
- Google Cloud C4 instances with Intel Xeon 6 processors achieved 1.4x to 1.7x higher normalized throughput per vCPU over C3 instances across batch sizes up to 64.
- At batch size 64, C4 delivered a 1.7x Total Cost of Ownership advantage over C3 due to combined throughput gains and near price parity per vCPU.

**Tags:** [Google Cloud](https://yomu.fyi/topic/gcp), [LLMs](https://yomu.fyi/topic/llm), [Machine Learning](https://yomu.fyi/topic/machine-learning), [Performance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance)

[Read original post](https://huggingface.co/blog/gpt-oss-on-intel-xeon)