Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cloud.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 146 posts

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

#21

Post by t3rabytes »

tpetry wrote: 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.

I did some rudimentary testing with AMD vs Intel on AWS recently and found that AMD lacked enough in single threaded perf that it meant they weren’t worth the savings for our workloads (Rails apps).

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

#22

Post by dilyevsky »

api wrote: post #18
tpetry wrote: 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.

From what I've seen AMD's recent chips beat (sometimes outright destroy) Intel on multithreaded tasks, but on single-threaded tasks it's still a bit of a toss up and depends on the work load. Intel seems to still come out ahead on some heavy numeric and scientific type work loads, especially if vector instructions are used. The differences are not huge though, and AMD solidly wins on price/performance even in cases w…

Is that with spectre/meltdown/etc protection on?

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

#24

Post by gpm »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #20
cvallejo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I also work on Google Cloud That's correct! Once the rollout completes, you will be able to use N2D instances for GKE!

> Disclosure: I also work on Google Cloud Wow, half of the comments so far start with this disclosure! Tons of Google people lurking on HN :)

Too be fair, it's just two of them answering questions, and one is both OP and the product manager.

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

#26

Post by actuator »

t3rabytes wrote: post #21
tpetry wrote: 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.

I did some rudimentary testing with AMD vs Intel on AWS recently and found that AMD lacked enough in single threaded perf that it meant they weren’t worth the savings for our workloads (Rails apps).

Care to publish if you have anything stored away from this?

I don't work with Rails anymore but the last Rails app(single threaded, Unicorn) I worked with raw CPU compute was not the bottleneck usually as with most CRUD apps time was mostly spent in I/O. This effect was so pronounced that I had set up most scaling groups on M or R instances as the memory used by the gems was the bottleneck on the number of Rails processes I could spawn in the box without exhausting resources. However I do remember even if CPU was not the bottleneck, moving to a processor with a better single thread performance did improve the median response time at the cost of making the same request throughput costlier.

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

#28

Post by kart23 »

pier25 wrote: post #27

What are the implications? Higher perf and/or lower price?

Looks to be about $5/Month cheaper, based on this page:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing#n2_machine_type...

Jeez, I didn't realize how expensive cloud compute was. I always wondered why my school still has a datacenter. Having your own servers still makes sense for a lot of orgs.

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

#30

Post by blattimwind »

dilyevsky wrote: post #22
api wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen AMD's recent chips beat (sometimes outright destroy) Intel on multithreaded tasks, but on single-threaded tasks it's still a bit of a toss up and depends on the work load. Intel seems to still come out ahead on some heavy numeric and scientific type work loads, especially if vector instructions are used. The differences are not huge though, and AMD solidly wins on price/performance even in cases w…

Is that with spectre/meltdown/etc protection on?

These are VMs, the hosts have to run with these mitigations enabled.
Post reply on HN