Benchmarking Amazon EC2's New C6a Instances Powered By 3rd Gen EPYC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Benchmarking Amazon EC2's New C6a Instances Powered By 3rd Gen EPYC

Last year Amazon launched the EC2 M6a instances powered by AMD EPYC 7003 series while this week they have expanded their range of AMD Zen 3 offerings by launching the EC2 C6a series. The EC2 C6a instances are designed for compute-intensive workloads (hence the "C" series) and AWS is promoting it as offering up to 15% improvement in price-performance over prior-generation C5a instances and up to 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. I've run some benchmarks of the new EC2 C6a instances looking at how they perform over the prior 2nd Gen EPYC C5a based instances, against the Intel Ice Lake competition over in the M6i stack, and also how the C6a competes with Amazon's own Graviton2-based C6g type.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30923

[Mark Rose]

I've been using c6i instances in production for a couple months now, in the us-east-1 region. I replaced c5 instances. I'm currently looking at PHP performance on the c6a and we might switch to those if they perform comparably to the c6i. The c5a instances are not great for applications that are sensitive to memory latency, but do work well with more throughput oriented things like Kafka.

Edit: looks like c6i is going to be the better option over c6a.