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New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

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Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#2
Now its getting really interesting: In the end you have to compare pricing for a vCore (which is a thread on a cpu) with per-thread performance on AMD vs. Intel. Does anyone know a benchmark like this? Epyc Processors are most often tested on heavy parallelizable tasks and not strictly single thread tasks.

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#5
post #2

Now its getting really interesting: In the end you have to compare pricing for a vCore (which is a thread on a cpu) with per-thread performance on AMD vs. Intel. Does anyone know a benchmark like this? Epyc Processors are most often tested on heavy parallelizable tasks and not strictly single thread tasks.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Performance is a tricky, multi-dimensional thing, so there are many benchmarks that try to map to different workloads. For example, specint is often used for exactly your "single threaded task" benchmark, but if what you work on is numerical computing, you mostly don't care (you want specfp at the least and even that is bad).

Some people seem to really like Coremark these days. Others like specintrate. What kind of application do you care about? I'd guess plenty of folks here can provide a better estimate with that info.

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#6
post #3

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. cvallejo is the PM, so ask her anything!

Does the new n2d machine type support nested virtualization?

(Asking because Azure supports nested virtualization but only on some machine types. AWS doesn't support nested virtualization at all. Google Cloud seems to support nested virtualization on other machine types.)

Also, why 224 rather than 256?

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#7
post #3

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. cvallejo is the PM, so ask her anything!

Does the new n2d machine type support nested virtualization? (Asking because Azure supports nested virtualization but only on some machine types. AWS doesn't support nested virtualization at all. Google Cloud seems to support nested virtualization on other machine types.) Also, why 224 rather than 256?

We do not yet support AMD's nested implementation (we do on Intel). But cvallejo is also the PM for Nested :).

As for 224, we've always reserved threads on each host for I/O and so on. Figure 2 from the Snap paper [1] is probably the best public reference. We also don't make it clear (on purpose) what size the underlying host processors are, though you can clearly guesstimate pretty easily.

[1] https://research.google/pubs/pub48630/

Re: New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

#10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the new n2d machine type support nested virtualization? (Asking because Azure supports nested virtualization but only on some machine types. AWS doesn't support nested virtualization at all. Google Cloud seems to support nested virtualization on other machine types.) Also, why 224 rather than 256?

We do not yet support AMD's nested implementation (we do on Intel). But cvallejo is also the PM for Nested :). As for 224, we've always reserved threads on each host for I/O and so on. Figure 2 from the Snap paper [1] is probably the best public reference. We also don't make it clear (on purpose) what size the underlying host processors are, though you can clearly guesstimate pretty easily. [1] https://research.googl…

Speaking of nested virtualization, are there any plans to support this on E2, or will we have to use other instance types?
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