Benchmarking Amazon's ARM Graviton CPU With EC2's A1 Instances

First up was the single-threaded venerable PHP benchmark given the prolific usage of PHP by customers on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud... From these results we see the Graviton processors deliver around half the performance of the AMD EPYC 7571 processors for this single-threaded pure PHP benchmark while the Intel Xeon Platinum-based M5 instances were running at 3x the performance of Amazon's first ARMv8 processors.

Additional PHP benchmarks reinforce just how far behind Graviton is compared to the current Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors. Of course, we know Intel Cascade Lake is right around the corner and EPYC 2 is also releasing in 2019. It will be interesting to see what's up with any Graviton 2 processor.

PyBench as a test of Python on Amazon EC2, Graviton was well behind the EPYC and Xeon performance.

For audio encoding on the Amazon cloud, Graviton is much slower than the x86_64 instances.

With the multi-threaded x264 video encoding test we can at least see some potential out of the Graviton performance relative to EPYC and Xeon, but it's still not all that great. The A1 instances with twice the vCPU count would perform with the AMD/Intel M5 instances... So an a1.xlarge performing like the m5.large and m5a.large and the a1.4xlarge just ahead of the m5.2xlarge/m5a.2xlarge.