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

Written by Michael Larabel in Computers on 15 November 2018 at 07:40 AM EST. Page 1 of 4. 2 Comments.

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.

AMD EPYC vs. Intel Xeon Packet Benchmarks

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.


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