Amazon Graviton3 vs. Intel Xeon vs. AMD EPYC Performance

Earlier this week AWS announced general availability on their new Arm Neoverse-V1 based processors, Graviton3. Right after that I posted some initial Graviton3 benchmarks against prior-generation Graviton2 for showing the very sizable generational improvement with Amazon's new in-house Arm server processors. Since then I have been carrying out a more robust set of around 100 benchmarks across the original Graviton instance, Graviton2, Graviton3, and then up again Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC competing instances. Here is that much larger collection of Graviton3 performance benchmarks carried out on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

For today's article the following Amazon EC2 instances were benchmarked for better gauging the Graviton3 performance potential and also the price-performance in Amazon's cloud:

a1.4xlarge - The original Graviton processors using Cortex-A72 cores. The a1.4xlarge instance type was priced on-demand at $0.408 USD per hour.
c6g.4xlarge - The now prior-generation Graviton2 instance type using Neoverse-N1 cores. The on-demand c6g.4xlarge pricing was $0.544 USD per hour.
c6a.4xlarge - The AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" instance type powered by an AMD EPYC 7R13 processor. The c6a.4xlarge instance was priced on-demand at $0.612 USD per hour.
c6i.4xlarge - The Intel Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" instance type using a Xeon Platinum 8375C processor. The c6i.4xlarge was using the Xeon Platinum 8375C processor. The c6i.4xlarge instance type was priced on-demand at $0.68 USD per hour.
c7g.4xlarge - The new Graviton3 instance type with Neoverse-V1 cores. The c7g.4xlarge on-demand pricing is currently at $0.58 USD per hour.

The AWS 4xlarge size is 16 vCPUs and 32GB of RAM. All of these Amazon EC2 instances were tested using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with its default Linux 5.15 kernel and GCC 11.2 based compiler, compared to the earlier Graviton3 testing using the default Amazon Linux 2 OS. It's worth reminding that for 16 vCPUs, in the case of Graviton processors it's all physical CPU cores with no SMT/HT while in the case of the AMD and Intel instances it's a mix of physical cores and sibling threads. Just the "4xlarge" size was tested as a mid-range EC2 configuration and trying to keep costs to a modest minimum (please disable ad-blockers if you enjoy this content or join Phoronix Premium).

Around 100 different benchmarks were carried out while looking at the Graviton3 performance against these different instances. So after seeing the great uplift from Graviton2 to Graviton3, let's see how much progress has been made since the original Graviton and how Amazon's Arm server processor can compete with Intel Xeon Ice Lake and AMD EPYC Milan for raw performance and performance-per-dollar in the cloud.