Benchmarking Packet.com's Bare Metal Intel Xeon / AMD EPYC Cloud

With the tests earlier this week of the 16-way AMD EPYC cloud comparison the real standout of those tests across Amazon EC2, Packet, and SkySilk was Packet's bare metal cloud. For just $1.00 USD per hour it's possible to have bare metal access to an AMD EPYC 7401P 24-core / 48-thread server that offers incredible value compared to the other public cloud options for on-demand pricing. That led me to running some more benchmarks of Packet.com's other bare metal cloud options to see how the Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC options compare.

Packet's on-demand server options for their "bare metal cloud" offerings range from an Intel Atom C2550 quad-core server with 8GB of RAM at just 7 cents per hour up to a dual Xeon Gold 6120 server with 28 cores at two dollars per hour with 384GB of RAM and 3.2TB of NVMe storage. There are also higher-end instances including NVIDIA GPUs but those are on a dynamic spot pricing basis.

The only AMD EPYC option at this time is their "c2.medium.x86" instance type that is the EPYC 7401P 24-cores / 48-threads with 64GB of RAM and 960GB of storage at $1.00 USD per hour. (Packet also advertises Cavium ThunderX ARM servers though currently there is no availability.)

For seeing how these different low-cost, bare metal access on-demand server options compare I benchmarked the c1.small, s1.large, c2.medium, c1.xlarge, m1.xlarge, and m2.xlarge options as all of their key offerings at this point.

All of these instances were tested with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS x86_64 running the Linux 4.15 kernel and GCC 7.3 compiler. These benchmarks were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. Beyond looking at the raw performance, the performance-per-dollar / value was also explored based upon Packet's current on-demand pricing.