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Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

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Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#31

Post by Aurornis »

zackify wrote: post #26
Aurornis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My 4565p is a $500 cpu... 32 vcpus... racked in a datacenter. The machine cost under 2k. > The cloud provider charging $140 / mo for 3x less vcpus you break even in a couple months, it doesn't matter if it dies a few months later How do you calculate break even in a couple months if the machine costs $2,000 and you still have to pay colo fees? If your colo fees were $100 month you wouldn’t break even for over 4 yea…

the 140/mo is for 3x less vcpu, so $420/mo savings if you use all those same cores. sorry for the poor comparison wording there. in a few months already up to $1300+ by 6 months already paid the machine. colo fees are cheap if you need more than just 1u. even with a 50-100 fee you easily get way more performance and come ahead within a year

> by 6 months already paid the machine.

You originally said “a couple months” but now it’s 6 months and assumption of $0 collocation fees which isn’t realistic

In my experience situations rarely call for precisely 32 cores for a fixed period of 3 years to support calculations like this anyway. We start with a small set of cloud servers and scale them up as traffic grows. Today’s tooling makes it easy to auto scale throughout the day, even.

When trying to rack a server everyone aims higher because it sucks to start running into limits unexpectedly and be stuck on a server that wasn’t big enough to handle the load. Then you have to start considering having at least two servers in case one starts failing.

Racking a single self-built server is great for hobby projects but it’s always more complicated for serving real business workloads.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#32

Post by PaulKeeble »

A few comparisons just from a gaming PC with a 9800X3D (8C16T 5.2 Ghz Boost).

7 Zip benchmark

9800X3D 130 GIPs compression, 134 GIPs decompress.

C8A 21577 MIPs (21.5GIPs) compression, 9868 MIPS decompression (9.9GIPs).

Geekbench 5

9800X3D 16975 multithread, 2474 single thread

C8A 4049 multithread, 2240 single thread

A desktop class CPU is definitely quicker single threaded and multithreaded, no surprises there most of these are dual core. The single threaded performance of the C8A is actually pretty good but its also the best of the bunch by a wide margin most of the CPUs are far behind. Memory performance appears to be attrocious all around.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#34

Post by Aurornis »

boberoni wrote: post #11

Anyone have experience with Oracle Cloud and ease of moving away? This benchmark seems to recommend Oracle Cloud, but I’ve heard that Oracle has historically used aggressive licenses and legal terms to keep customers locked-in.

I signed up for an Oracle Cloud trial. They closed my trial a few days later and shut down my one trial VM without warning.

Weirdly they didn’t allow me to add payment info to continue. Even weirder their sales people kept contacting me asking me to come back. When I explained the situation they all tried to fix it and then went radio silent until the next sales rep came along to try to convince me to stay.

I searched Reddit at the time and a lot of other people had the same experience. A lot of other people were bragging about abusing their free tier and trials without consequences. I still don’t know how they decided to permanently close my account (without informing the sales team)

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#35

Post by ibejoeb »

rr808 wrote: post #4

Still having your own hardware seems so much cheaper. Maybe even just for dev/uat environments? Every big corporate I have worked at has lower cost of capital than Amazon, and yet they want to move to AWS. I just dont understand it.

I've moved two clients to colo. Dramatic cost savings. So many systems only use VMs and a few basic cloud features. Everyone knows this, but just to make the point, you can still use certain cloud products (cloud storage for example) just fine while running your primary workloads on your own hardware. Sometimes it makes perfect sense, and you just need someone to nudge you and tell you it's going to be ok.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#37

Post by icelancer »

zackify wrote: post #20

I just ran some massive tests on our own CI. I use AMD Turin for this on gcp, which was noted as one of the fastest ones in the article. The most insane part here is that the AMD EPYC 4565p can beat the turin's used on the cloud providers, by as much as 2x in the single core. Our tests took 2 minutes on GCP, 1 minute flat on the 4565p with its boost to 5.1ghz holding steady vs only 4.1ghz on the gcp ones. GCP charges…

Self-racking lets you rack a bunch of gear you'd never find in VM/dedicated rentals, like consumer parts or older, still very good parts. Overclocking options are available as well if you DIY.

If you need single-threaded performance, colo is really the only way to go anyway.

We have two full racks and we're super happy with them.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#38

Post by edoceo »

Aurornis wrote: post #31
zackify wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the 140/mo is for 3x less vcpu, so $420/mo savings if you use all those same cores. sorry for the poor comparison wording there. in a few months already up to $1300+ by 6 months already paid the machine. colo fees are cheap if you need more than just 1u. even with a 50-100 fee you easily get way more performance and come ahead within a year

> by 6 months already paid the machine. You originally said “a couple months” but now it’s 6 months and assumption of $0 collocation fees which isn’t realistic In my experience situations rarely call for precisely 32 cores for a fixed period of 3 years to support calculations like this anyway. We start with a small set of cloud servers and scale them up as traffic grows. Today’s tooling makes it easy to auto scale th…

Don't nit-pick the "couple". It was used casually - like to mean not terribly long time. So the 2-6 spread, while technically big, is still just a trifle. While I'm nit-picking; up thread is talking about a limited box for CI and you're talking about scaling up real business workloads. That's just like the difference between 2 and 6. Give it a rest.

Everyone: run your scenarios and expectations in a spreadsheet and then use real data to run your CBA. Your case will be unique(ish) so make your case for your situation.

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#39

Post by oDot »

zackify wrote: post #20

I just ran some massive tests on our own CI. I use AMD Turin for this on gcp, which was noted as one of the fastest ones in the article. The most insane part here is that the AMD EPYC 4565p can beat the turin's used on the cloud providers, by as much as 2x in the single core. Our tests took 2 minutes on GCP, 1 minute flat on the 4565p with its boost to 5.1ghz holding steady vs only 4.1ghz on the gcp ones. GCP charges…

I used to run a site that compares prices[0]. Not only is the ecosystem pull to the cloud strong, but many developers today look at bare metal as downright daunting.

Not sure where that fear comes from. Cloud challenges can be as or more complex than bare metal ones.

[0]: https://baremetalsavings.com/

Re: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

#40

Post by a012 »

dijit wrote: post #13
jiggawatts wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kudos to Lisa Su and the team. They're a typical hardware maker unable to focus on software, which is why NVIDIA is now a multi-trillion dollar corporation and AMD is "just" a few hundred billion. They've focused too much on CPUs and completely dropped the ball on AI and compute accelerators. It's especially sad considering that the MI300 and related accelerators on paper are competitive with NVIDIA hardware, it's…

Don’t really care. We were stuck with Intel, its nice that we have better CPUs.

Yeah, remember when 4 core 8 threads were the high-end CPUs until AMD Ryzen came out? If AMD didn't do their best job then we're still stuck with the norm of 4 cores for more years as I can imagine.
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