"Yes", most systems are Google, including those in Cloud, are dual socket. [Edit: To be clear, we're not sharing the SKU, but this is a real server-class Xeon].
Purley is the big Skylake based server platform chipset reset for Xeon E5 and higher so Google must have early access to it.
Skylake Xeon E3 is on the current older server chipsets..
Purley is supposed to be a significant improvement.
Thanks!
We announced with Intel back in November that we would be getting early access to Skylake [1]. Today's announcement is that we're ready to let more people in the door.
E3 is not a server SKU, it's meant for workstations and it's more similar to i7 than E5. It lacks various features including ECC RAM which, I suppose, is a no-starter for cloud hosting. Also some virtualization capabilities are missing, notably accelerated interrupt injection (APICv+posted interrupts).
E3 does support ECC RAM.
I'm running a Haswell Xeon E3-1225 with 16GB ECC RAM as my workstation.
I believe that the ability to use ECC RAM is actually the main differentiator between i7 and E3.
I've seen E3's in low end servers like the Dell T20...
I've only seen E3s on Intel's web-site. But maybe E5s are coming? That'd be awesome.