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Cheapest Source of x86 Cores?

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Re: Cheapest Source of x86 Cores?

#11

Post by justinclift »

When you say "at scale", how many cores are you likely wanting to use at once, and for how long?

If it's for several hundred hours worth of compute, then dedicated servers can start to look pretty good.

eg: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax161

€119.80/mo, for a 32 (real) core Zen2 EPYC with 128GB ram

They generally tend to have better local disk performance than most cloud servers, but that might be irrelevant for your use case. :)

If you're just doing short bursts of use though, then it's probably not the right option.

Re: Cheapest Source of x86 Cores?

#12

Post by tyingq »

justinclift wrote: post #11

When you say "at scale", how many cores are you likely wanting to use at once, and for how long? If it's for several hundred hours worth of compute, then dedicated servers can start to look pretty good. eg: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax161 €119.80/mo, for a 32 (real) core Zen2 EPYC with 128GB ram They generally tend to have better local disk performance than most cloud servers, but that might be irr…

You'll would have to bump up from 128GB ram for a fair comparison. I didn't look exhaustively, but $.02/core-hour is hard to beat, especially since he's quoting that much memory and real (not smt/hyperthreads) core hours.

Re: Cheapest Source of x86 Cores?

#14

Post by justinclift »

tyingq wrote: post #12
justinclift wrote: post #11

When you say "at scale", how many cores are you likely wanting to use at once, and for how long? If it's for several hundred hours worth of compute, then dedicated servers can start to look pretty good. eg: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax161 €119.80/mo, for a 32 (real) core Zen2 EPYC with 128GB ram They generally tend to have better local disk performance than most cloud servers, but that might be irr…

You'll would have to bump up from 128GB ram for a fair comparison. I didn't look exhaustively, but $.02/core-hour is hard to beat, especially since he's quoting that much memory and real (not smt/hyperthreads) core hours.

Oh, good point. Yeah, that'd need to double the ram if they're going to use 4GB ram per SMT core. :)

Doing that moves the cost up to €165.80 for 64 SMT cores with 256GB ram for a full month.

(Note - I've updated those prices as I previously forgot to set the region to "US" for the Hetzner pricing thing)

--

Lets see if my math is working today. ;)

€165.80 / 64 cores = 2.5906 per core, per month

Using 720 hours a month for our purposes, that's €0.0036 per core hour.

--

Use xe.com to do pricing conversion, that €165.80 is US$179.79.

So, $179.79 / 64 cores = $2.809 per core, per month

Using 720 hours a month for our purposes, that's US$0.0039 per core hour.

So, about a fifth of the price of $.02/core-hour.

Re: Cheapest Source of x86 Cores?

#15

Post by re-thc »

prhrb wrote: post #10

I also want cheapest compute for software video encoding, ARM or x86 is fine. can someone give suggestions? I am currently using oracle cloud

Where are your videos? Encoding is a more complicated problem in that the source and destination would impact things. Bandwidth transfer can cost more than the compute on some clouds (and impact speeds).

If it's on S3 it might still be best to use AWS EC2 in the same region.

Oracle is definitely a good choice with 10TB free tier.

Hetzner cloud likely has cheaper compute than Oracle.

Upcloud has the fastest CPU.

Re: Cheapest Source of x86 Cores?

#16

Post by tyingq »

justinclift wrote: post #14
tyingq wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll would have to bump up from 128GB ram for a fair comparison. I didn't look exhaustively, but $.02/core-hour is hard to beat, especially since he's quoting that much memory and real (not smt/hyperthreads) core hours.

Oh, good point. Yeah, that'd need to double the ram if they're going to use 4GB ram per SMT core. :) Doing that moves the cost up to €165.80 for 64 SMT cores with 256GB ram for a full month. (Note - I've updated those prices as I previously forgot to set the region to "US" for the Hetzner pricing thing) -- Lets see if my math is working today. ;) €165.80 / 64 cores = 2.5906 per core, per month Using 720 hours a month…

That is comparing an SMT core to an actual core. The c5.18xlarge is 36/72 cores/vcpus. Still cheaper, yes.

Though I don't know how much you lose in scheduling trying to keep it fully utilized 24/7 versus the spot pricing.

Re: Cheapest Source of x86 Cores?

#17

Post by mewmew07 »

amelius wrote: post #8

Why does one have to ask HN for this? It looks to me like the market could be more transparent here.

the price confusion/obscurity facilitates higher prices, none of the players on the sell side would benefit from lower margins, so they all do the same

Re: Cheapest Source of x86 Cores?

#19

Post by justinclift »

re-thc wrote: post #15
prhrb wrote: post #10

I also want cheapest compute for software video encoding, ARM or x86 is fine. can someone give suggestions? I am currently using oracle cloud

Where are your videos? Encoding is a more complicated problem in that the source and destination would impact things. Bandwidth transfer can cost more than the compute on some clouds (and impact speeds). If it's on S3 it might still be best to use AWS EC2 in the same region. Oracle is definitely a good choice with 10TB free tier. Hetzner cloud likely has cheaper compute than Oracle. Upcloud has the fastest CPU.

Depending upon the type of encoding being used, GPU instances might be worth having a look at as well. :)
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