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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

#41

Post by api »

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?

Don't know, but for pure numeric code these mitigations are not (AFAIK) that expensive. The main cost is incurred for any code that is syscall-heavy like I/O.

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

#42

Post by theevilsharpie »

mdasen wrote: post #31

Since people from Google Cloud are likely here, one thing I'd like to ask/talk about: are we getting too many options for compute? One of the great things about Google Cloud was that it was very easy to order. None of this "t2.large" where you'd have to look up how much memory and CPU that it has and potentially how many credits you're going to get per hour and such. I think Google Cloud is still easier, but it's get…

> For example, the N2D instances are basically the price of the N1 instances or even cheaper with committed-use discounts. Given that they provide 39% more performance, should the N1 instances be considered obsolete once the N2D exits beta?

As the name implies, N2 is a newer generation than N1. I don't think Google has announced any official N1 deprecation timeline, but that product line clearly has an expiration date.

The more direct comparison would be Intel's N2 instances, vs. AMD's N2D instances. In that case, N2 instances are likely faster on a per-core basis and support some Intel-specific instructions, whereas N2D instances are substantially less expensive.

> Again, I want to reiterate that Google Cloud's simpler pricing is great, but complications have crept in.

That seems like an unavoidable consequence of maturing as a product offering: more options means more complexity. If Google tried to streamline everything and removed options to keep things simple, they'd have another cohort of users (including myself) screaming that the product doesn't meet their needs.

I suppose a "Help Me Choose" wizard that provides some opinionated guidance can be helpful to onboarding new users, but otherwise, I don't see how Google can win here.

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

#43

Post by Tuna-Fish »

thedance wrote: post #40
wmf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically. This is the best server processor.

Big claim there. On what basis?

You can pick almost any basis you like, it's still winning.

Most performance, most performance per watt, most performance per cost. Also, more performance per thread than high-threadcount intel chips. (Although, some of their low-threadcount Xeons do have an edge on that one.)

Oh, and best memory interface and best IO, too.

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

#44

Post by [deleted] »

mdasen wrote: post #31

Since people from Google Cloud are likely here, one thing I'd like to ask/talk about: are we getting too many options for compute? One of the great things about Google Cloud was that it was very easy to order. None of this "t2.large" where you'd have to look up how much memory and CPU that it has and potentially how many credits you're going to get per hour and such. I think Google Cloud is still easier, but it's get…

[deleted]

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

#45

Post by wmf »

theevilsharpie wrote: post #42
mdasen wrote: post #31

Since people from Google Cloud are likely here, one thing I'd like to ask/talk about: are we getting too many options for compute? One of the great things about Google Cloud was that it was very easy to order. None of this "t2.large" where you'd have to look up how much memory and CPU that it has and potentially how many credits you're going to get per hour and such. I think Google Cloud is still easier, but it's get…

> For example, the N2D instances are basically the price of the N1 instances or even cheaper with committed-use discounts. Given that they provide 39% more performance, should the N1 instances be considered obsolete once the N2D exits beta? As the name implies, N2 is a newer generation than N1. I don't think Google has announced any official N1 deprecation timeline, but that product line clearly has an expiration dat…

They should just hide everything besides Rome under an "advanced" UI. ;-)

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

#46

Post by anthony_doan »

kart23 wrote: post #28
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.

It's also expensive to get data out of cloud too. Getting data in is easy but getting it out will cost you.

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

#47

Post by Jyaif »

wolf550e wrote: post #38
privateSFacct wrote: post #29

Does AWS have a comparable offering? I haven't seen anything on EPYC - congrats to GCP for moving quickly. I'm mostly AWS based currently.

See https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/04/amazon-ec...

Your link is for the 1st gen EPYC cpus, while this announcement is for the 2nd gen.

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

#48

Post by kccqzy »

mdasen wrote: post #31

Since people from Google Cloud are likely here, one thing I'd like to ask/talk about: are we getting too many options for compute? One of the great things about Google Cloud was that it was very easy to order. None of this "t2.large" where you'd have to look up how much memory and CPU that it has and potentially how many credits you're going to get per hour and such. I think Google Cloud is still easier, but it's get…

I think for enterprise businesses, people just love choices. I don't know about GCP but I do know about highly paid AWS consultants producing detailed comparisons between instance types and make recommendations for companies to "save money." Or maybe some people just like the thrill of using spreadsheets and navigating the puzzle of pricing.

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

#49

Post by theevilsharpie »

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).

AMD-based AWS instances are running on first-generation Epyc processors.

Compared to the second-generation Epyc processors that Google is using, the first generation has lower clock speeds, can execute fewer instructions per clock (particularly in terms of floating-point operations), has substantially less cache, and has a more complicated memory topology that can negatively impact the performance of workloads that aren't NUMA-aware.

In short, your experience with AMD in AWS isn't relevant to Google's offerings.

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

#50

Post by rb808 »

mdasen wrote: post #31

Since people from Google Cloud are likely here, one thing I'd like to ask/talk about: are we getting too many options for compute? One of the great things about Google Cloud was that it was very easy to order. None of this "t2.large" where you'd have to look up how much memory and CPU that it has and potentially how many credits you're going to get per hour and such. I think Google Cloud is still easier, but it's get…

Cloud is a poor metaphor now. Its really a messy bunch of constellations where some people think they can see a pretty picture, most people just see random dots.
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