Amazon's Arm-based Graviton2 Against AMD and Intel: Comparing Cloud Compute
by Andrei Frumusanu on March 10, 2020 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Servers
- CPUs
- Cloud Computing
- Amazon
- AWS
- Neoverse N1
- Graviton2
Cost Analysis - An x86 Massacre
The Graviton2 showcased that it can keep up extremely well in terms of performance and throughput, even beating the competition in a lot of the tests. However sometimes you don’t care too much about performance, and you just want to get some workload completed in the cheapest way possible, at which point value comes into play.
Amazon does allude to that, stating that the new chip is able to achieve 40% better performance per dollar than its competition. As covered in the introduction, for the 64-vCPU count 16xlarge instances the m6g (Graviton2), m5a (EPYC1), and m5n (Xeon Cascade Lake) are priced at an hourly cost of $2.464, $2.752 and $3.808 respectively.
Translating the time to completion of our various SPEC tests to hours and multiplying by the hourly cost, we end up with a cost per fixed workload metric:
An aggregate of all workloads summed up together, which should hopefully end up in a representative figure for a wide variety of real-world use-cases, we do end up seeing the Graviton2 coming in 40% cheaper than the competing platforms, an outstanding figure.
If we were to compare the same fixed workload at smaller instance counts, because of Graviton2’s better per-thread performance, we’re seeing even better results on 4xlarge (16 vCPUs) instances. Here the Amazon chip showcases 43% better value than the Xeon chip, and beats the AMD instances by being 53% cheaper.
If we were to transform the results into a fixed throughput per dollar metric, we again see the Graviton2 far ahead. The unit here is SPEC runs per dollar.
The lower the vCPU instance size, the better value the Graviton2 seemingly becomes, as its performance with increased vCPUs scales sublinearly, but the cost of bigger vCPU instances scales linearly, an effect that’s almost not present at all in the AMD system, and only marginally present in the Xeon instances.
Again, the Graviton2’s scaling here might differ in production instances, but given that you can’t just chop off half the chip (or have access to only one of two sockets, in Intel’s case here) and that Amazon seemingly isn’t doing any static partitioning of the chip’s shared resources, I do think it’s more likely than not that such performance and value figures will be encountered in the real-world.
Even ignoring the lower vCPU instances, Amazon was able to deliver on its promise of 40% better performance per dollar, and it’s a massive shakeup for the AWS and EC2 ecosystem.
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jbrower - Saturday, July 24, 2021 - link
Well at least you have a troll -- mark of success for authors, heheProDigit - Wednesday, March 11, 2020 - link
110W is very pessimistic, and would make no sense at all, considering that the ryzen 9 3900x uses 105W at 12 cores 24 threads at 4.6Ghz and 7nm, and the 3950 does the same with 4 more cores.Plus, regular arm based (AMLogic) boxes use 3Watt in total under load (that includes CPU+Ethernet+RAM+Emmc) for 4 CPU cores running at 1,9Ghz.
If you ask me, 64 core arm CPUs running at 2Ghz should run at around just over 1 watt per core, making it a 65W tdp chip
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, March 11, 2020 - link
There's 64 PCIe4 lanes and 8 memory controllers in there as well.cdome - Wednesday, March 11, 2020 - link
Quick question. Does Graviton2 have support for SVE2 vector extension? if yes how wide are execution units? thank youAndrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, March 11, 2020 - link
No, there's 2x128b v8 ASIMD/NEON pipes.Soulkeeper - Wednesday, March 11, 2020 - link
What was used to generate the images on page 2 ?ie: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15578/AMD-Epyc-6...
Is this app/source available to download ?
Thanks
sharath.naik - Wednesday, March 11, 2020 - link
Whats behind the name Annapurna? The name is Indian in origin but the company is Israeli.nijimon - Thursday, March 12, 2020 - link
Judging by the logo it could be referring to the massif in the Himalayas.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna_Massif
Andy Chow - Thursday, March 12, 2020 - link
"I recently had the time to write a new custom microbenchmark for testing synchronisation latencies of CPU cores, exhibiting some of the cache-coherency as well as physical layouts of current designs."Wow, and what a benchmark that turned out to be. Please consider packaging it and releasing it. Or giving us the code so we can run it. I would really love to run that test on a few of my machines. I am frustrated with current benchmarks on this area also, and you seem to have built the perfect solution.
ballsystemlord - Thursday, March 12, 2020 - link
1 Grammar error:"Overall, it's a bit odd to see GCC ahead in that many workloads given that LLVM the is the primary compiler for billions of Arm devices in the mobile space."
Extra "the":
"Overall, it's a bit odd to see GCC ahead in that many workloads given that LLVM is the primary compiler for billions of Arm devices in the mobile space."