New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

(cloud.google.com)

343 points cvallejo | 1 comments | 18 Feb 20 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source

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tpetry ◴[18 Feb 20 16:57 UTC] No.22357449[source]▶

Now its getting really interesting: In the end you have to compare pricing for a vCore (which is a thread on a cpu) with per-thread performance on AMD vs. Intel. Does anyone know a benchmark like this? Epyc Processors are most often tested on heavy parallelizable tasks and not strictly single thread tasks.

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t3rabytes ◴[18 Feb 20 17:41 UTC] No.22358054[source]▶

>>22357449 #

I did some rudimentary testing with AMD vs Intel on AWS recently and found that AMD lacked enough in single threaded perf that it meant they weren’t worth the savings for our workloads (Rails apps).

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1. theevilsharpie ◴[18 Feb 20 18:40 UTC] No.22358831[source]▶

>>22358054 #

AMD-based AWS instances are running on first-generation Epyc processors.

Compared to the second-generation Epyc processors that Google is using, the first generation has lower clock speeds, can execute fewer instructions per clock (particularly in terms of floating-point operations), has substantially less cache, and has a more complicated memory topology that can negatively impact the performance of workloads that aren't NUMA-aware.

In short, your experience with AMD in AWS isn't relevant to Google's offerings.

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