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

When running the single-threaded LAME MP3 encoding benchmark, it was interesting to see that the EC2 instances came in faster than all of the SkySilk instances. This difference is likely due to the EC2 cloud relying upon EPYC 7571 processors that have a 2.5GHz base clock frequency compared to 2.2GHz with the EPYC 7601 processors used at SkySilk. The Packet performance with its EPYC 7401P was right in the middle of the competing clouds.

With a single-threaded PHP benchmark test, EC2 was similarly in a very slight lead.

Meanwhile for the Node.js Express benchmark, SkySilk appeared to have a slight advantage over the EC2 instances.

The BRL-CAD performance for open-source solid modeling saw the SkySilk ultimate instance take the lead over the Packet option.

Lastly is a look at the cost to run the benchmarks on the each of the sixteen AMD EPYC instances. Hopefully you found these metrics and all of the rest of the performance data useful if you are considering any of these AMD Linux cloud options from the public clouds. The Packet performance was arguably most interesting for the level of performance achieved at $1.00 per hour spot pricing, but between Amazon EC2 and SkySilk was also very healthy and interesting competition depending upon your needs whether going after the best performance-per-dollar, overall cost, or raw compute performance needs.

Some Intel vs. AMD cloud benchmarks will likely be up soon. If you wish to compare your own cloud or server performance against all of the data found in this article, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1811127-SK-AMDEPYCCL13.