100+ Benchmarks Of Amazon's Graviton2 64-Core CPU Against AMD's EPYC 7742

Last week Amazon AWS promoted their Graviton2 instances to general availability status with a variety of different sized EC2 instances as well as a bare metal instance for tapping the full potential of their new SoC that features 64 Arm Neoverse N1 cores. Last week we ran through many benchmarks looking at Graviton2 on EC2 and bare metal performance while here is a follow-up article with more benchmarks and looking at how the sixty-four core Arm Graviton2 compares to AMD's EPYC 7742 64-core CPU with and without SMT.

For the past number of days I have been running 140+ benchmarks on Amazon's Graviton2 m6g.metal instance for tapping the bare metal performance of this latest high-end Arm server SoC and then comparing it to the bare metal performance of EPYC 7742, AMD's current generation 64-core server CPU offering. The EPYC 7742 was tested with and without SMT for matching the Graviton2 that lacks SMT. No Intel CPUs were tested in this comparison due to their current lacking of a 64-core processor. Both the AMD EPYC 7742 and Graviton2 feature eight channels of DDR4-3200 memory.

The m6g.metal and EPYC 7742 systems were tested using their optimal memory frequency/channel configuration (8 x 32GB DDR4-3200) and with NVMe SSD storage. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with the Linux 5.4 kernel and other out-of-the-box packages were used for testing in seeing how the Graviton2 processor can compete with AMD's record-setting EPYC 7742.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide variety of benchmarks were conducted.