Amazon's New EC2 M7a AMD EPYC "Genoa" Instances Deliver Leading Performance In The AWS Cloud

While back in November was when AWS originally announced new EC2 instances powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors, only this week did they bring their M7a general purpose instances to a general availability state where anyone can access them. Being very impressed with 4th Gen EPYC bare metal as well as with Azure's HPC cloud, I fired up some benchmarks of the new Genoa-powered EC2 M7a instance compared to the new M7i instances powered by Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" as well as showing how the competition is to Amazon's in-house Graviton ARM-based server processors.

On Tuesday Amazon Web Services announced the availability of the EC2 M7a instances. With these new general purpose instances they are using Genoa processors with a clock frequency up to 3.7GHz. AWS is promoting these instances as being up to 50% higher performance over M6a -- in large part thanks to Genoa / Zen 4 supporting AVX-512 and the other big architectural improvements over Zen 3 as well as now making use of DDR5 server memory and more.

The new M7a instances can scale up to m7a.48xlarge for 192 vCPUs or even m7a.metal-48xl for having all bare metal access ot the flagship Genoa configuration. All of the instances are counting 1 vCPU as 1 physical core and thankfully refraining from counting the SMT sibling thread as a vCPU (SMT is off).

The M7a instances while I was testing these new options were making use of AMD EPYC 9R14 custom processors, the successor to the Milan-based EPYC 7R13 processors found with the prior generation EPYC instances.

For keeping cloud costs low, the "16xlarge" instance size was used for all of the testing in today's article in looking at the 64 vCPU performance. The different instances tested for this comparison included:

- c6g.16xlarge for a prior-generation Graviton2 performance look.
- m7g.16xlarge for Graviton3 performance.
- c7g.16xlarge for Graviton3 compute-focused performance.
- c7gn.16xlarge for the newest Graviton3E processors.
- c6a.16xlarge for AMD EPYC 7R13 Milan (Zen 3) performance.
- m7a.16xlarge for AMD EPYC 9R14 Genoa (Zen 4) performance of this new instance class.
- m7i.16xlarge for Intel Xeon Platinum 8488C Sapphire Rapids performance.

All of these instances were freshly benchmarked over the past few weeks using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with the Linux 5.19 kernel and stock GCC 11.3 compiler.

In addition to the raw performance the performance-per-dollar was also explored using the current hourly on-demand pricing for the US East data center where testing took place.