Benchmarks Of Amazon's New AMD EPYC "M5ad" Instances vs. Intel Xeon + ARM Graviton

Last year Amazon began offering AMD EPYC options for their EC2 public cloud and last week extended the line-up of EPYC cloud options with the new "M5ad" and "R5ad" instance types with greater performance potential while being built on the AWS Nitro System.

The new AMD EPYC powered M5ad instance types are intended for the general purpose workloads and priced cheaper than the Intel Xeon M5 options. The R5ad options meanwhile are catering towards memory intensive workloads. Details on these new AMD EPYC options on the Elastic Compute Cloud via this Amazon AWS blog post.

Following that announcement, I fired up some m5ad.2xlarge and m5ad.4xlarge instances for testing. Amazon continues using the EPYC 7571 processors, at least for the EPYC cloud instances we have tested. Besides testing the m5ad.2xlarge and m5ad.4xlarge instances, I also ran benchmarks using the existing m5a.2xlarge and m5a.4xlarge EPYC instances. Additionally, tests were done using the Intel Xeon Platinum 8175M powered m5.2xlarge and m5.4xlarge instances. Rounding out this testing was also benchmarks of the a1.2xlarge and a1.4xlarge Amazon Graviton ARMv8 CPU instance types.

Besides looking at the raw performance with the Phoronix Test Suite, the performance-per-dollar was also generated using the current on-demand spot pricing for each of the instances. All of these Intel / AMD / Graviton instances on Amazon EC2 were tested while running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.15 kernel in its default OS configuration.