Benchmarks Of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC On Amazon EC2 Against Intel Xeon, Graviton2

Today AMD and Amazon announced the general availability of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC "Rome" processors available via the Elastic Compute Cloud. AMD EPYC "Rome" on EC2 with the new "C5a" instance types offer very competitive performance against the latest Intel Xeon instance types, Amazon's own Graviton2 Arm-based instances, and a big upgrade compared to the first-generation EPYC processors in the cloud.

The AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors are now available on Amazon EC2 via the C5a instance types in the major AWS data centers. The C5a instances span up to 96 vCPUs. More details on the availability of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC in the cloud can be found via today's press release and the AWS blog.

We didn't have early access to the new EC2 C5a instances, so this is just some very early data collected over the past few hours for running on the C5a.8xlarge and C5a.16xlarge instance types compared to some very recent Intel and Graviton2 benchmark results.

The c5a.8xlarge and c5a.16xlarge instances were compared to the first-gen m5a.16xlarge and m5a.8xlarge (EPYC 7571 based) instances, Intel Xeon m5.16xlarge / m5.8xlarge (Xeon Platinum 8175M), and m6g.16xlarge / m6g.8xlarge Graviton2 Arm instances. Besides using the 8xlarge / 16xlarge instance types throughout, Amazon Linux 2 was the operating system used for all of this benchmarking.

The AMD EPYC Rome instances tested were powered by the EPYC 7R32 CPU. The EPYC 7R32 had been rumored for a while as a 280 Watt TDP part for the enterprise and not part of the normal line-up.

Given the short turnaround since these instances were announced hours ago, for this initial article is seeing how these 8xlarge/16xlarge instances compare for different workloads with the Phoronix Test Suite in raw performance. Follow-up articles will look more closely at the performance-per-dollar/value and other aspects.