16-Way AMD EPYC Cloud Benchmark Comparison: Amazon EC2 vs. SkySilk vs. Packet

First up was the venerable OpenSSL benchmark. SkySilk's ultimate instance with 40 vCPUs was understandably the fastest with not having access to the EC2 m5a.24xlarge instance. The EC2 m5a.12xlarge, SkySilk Leviathan, and Packet c2.medium.x86 instances were all performing close to the same for a second place finish. (There are performance-per-dollar benchmarks for the longer-running benchmarks for accuracy though with OpenSSL and a few other tests not taking too long to complete, they were not generated for the cost analysis.)

With the Darktable multi-threaded RAW image handling test cases, the Packet c2.medium instance was in the first followed by the EC2 m5a.12xlarge. Due to the quick run-times, there aren't the cost analysis graphs here, but Packet would easily wins hands-down with its $1 per hour pricing... The m5a.12xlarge for comparison is more than $2 per hour.

With the span of the 16 AMD EPYC instances tested, the time to compile a Linux kernel ranged from just under one minute with the fastest SkySilk, Packet, and EC2 instances to more than 12 minutes with the slowest 2 vCPU EPYC instance on the Elastic Compute Cloud.

Offering the best value if you are looking at the cloud as a build farm was the Packet c2.medium at just $1 per hour while delivering the best performance of the tested instances. The value of SkySilk was right in the middle and came out better than Amazon's lowest-end M5A instance types.