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Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

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41–50 of 83 posts

Re: Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

#41

In Amazon's Graviton 5 PR they note that over half of all new compute capacity added to AWS over the past three years has been Graviton-based. That's an amazing stat. It really is incredible how ARM basically commoditized processors (in a good way).

> over half of all new compute capacity added to AWS over the past three years has been Graviton-based. That's an amazing stat.

Yes and maybe no. They do "cheat" in that internal / managed services often use Graviton where possible. It works out cheaper without the Intel / AMD "tax".

Re: Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

#43
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the 5 variant isn't yet available outside of the preview, you can of course spin a 4 up and run geekbench yourself. Plenty of people have and you can find them in the GB DB. And of course most people spin up their specific workload to see how it compares. Core per core it pales compared to Apple's superlative processors, and falls behind AMD as well. But...that doesn't matter. You buy cloud resources generally…

Not true at all. Single thread CPU scores for Graviton2 are about half that of Intel, while only being about 20% cheaper at best.

Groan. Yes, absolutely true.

While I know this thread will turn into some noisy whack-a-mole bit of nonsense, an easy comparison is the c8g.2xlarge vs the c8i.2xlarge. The former is Graviton 4 vs Granite Rapids in the latter. Otherwise both 16GB, 15Gbps networking, and both are compute optimized, 8 vCPU machines.

Performance is very similar. Indeed, since you herald the ffmpeg result elsewhere the Graviton machine beats the Intel device by 16%.

And the Graviton is 17% cheaper.

Like, this is a ridiculous canard to even go down. Over half of AWS' new machines are Graviton based, but per your rhetoric they're actually uncompetitive. So I guess no one is using them? Wow, silly Amazon.

Re: Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

#44

Pricing when? :( https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

https://instances.vantage.sh/ recently added alerts for any pricing changes on EC2, including newly launching new instances. The site rebuilds every 4 hours so it usually breaks the pricing news first. I have it on for myself and its super helpful just to see when AWS changes things. [Disclaimer, I'm CEO of Vantage - the company that maintains the site]

Are the built in AWS cost monitoring tools so bad that multiple businesses( including yours) exist just to monitor cost externally ?

Or is your value proposition for companies that use a bunch of different cloud providers ?

Re: Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

#45
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true at all. Single thread CPU scores for Graviton2 are about half that of Intel, while only being about 20% cheaper at best.

Groan. Yes, absolutely true. While I know this thread will turn into some noisy whack-a-mole bit of nonsense, an easy comparison is the c8g.2xlarge vs the c8i.2xlarge. The former is Graviton 4 vs Granite Rapids in the latter. Otherwise both 16GB, 15Gbps networking, and both are compute optimized, 8 vCPU machines. Performance is very similar. Indeed, since you herald the ffmpeg result elsewhere the Graviton machine be…

The latter is a 4-core machine with 8 HyperThreads. This doesn't actually matter to your price-performance metric but is worth mentioning because it's the reason why the Intel part performs so comparatively poorly. They're fast chips, they're just wildly uneconomical. If you wanted to compare equal core counts (c8i.4xlarge vs. c8g.2xlarge), then the Intel instance type wins on performance but the Graviton is 58% cheaper.

Re: Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

#46

General purpose not AI specific? I can't believe it.

AWS has plenty of AI specific offerings for EC2. The P, G and Trn families hit a wide range of AI use cases. Why wouldn't they also offer a general purpose one for typical compute?

Plus with the AI boom, making sure that general purpose compute jobs aren't competing for valuable GPUs is very worthwhile...

Re: Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

#47

General purpose not AI specific? I can't believe it.

AWS has plenty of AI specific offerings for EC2. The P, G and Trn families hit a wide range of AI use cases. Why wouldn't they also offer a general purpose one for typical compute?

You missed the touch of sarcasm. It's a joke, recent AWS announcements have been heavily AI-focused.

Re: Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inversely, I think it's siloed things in somewhat unhealthy ways. We now have a number of vendors that sell/rent you machines that are not generally purchasable. I don't think we've seen too many negative consequences yet, but if things continue in this direction then choosing a cloud provider for a high performance application (eg, something you'll want to compile to machine code and is therefore architecture specif…

Graviton CPUs are just Neoverse cores (V3 in this case). While it’s true that you can’t just buy a box with the same cores, the cores are basically the same as what you’ll get on a Google or Azure cloud instance (eventually… the latter two have yet to make available anything with Neoverse V3 yet).

Strangely the first-generation Graviton chips have actually shown up in MikroTik hardware that you can just buy. Amazon must be selling off their stock to third parties once it's phased out of use at AWS, but I doubt they'll ever sell the stuff they're still using.

Re: Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://instances.vantage.sh/ recently added alerts for any pricing changes on EC2, including newly launching new instances. The site rebuilds every 4 hours so it usually breaks the pricing news first. I have it on for myself and its super helpful just to see when AWS changes things. [Disclaimer, I'm CEO of Vantage - the company that maintains the site]

Are the built in AWS cost monitoring tools so bad that multiple businesses( including yours) exist just to monitor cost externally ? Or is your value proposition for companies that use a bunch of different cloud providers ?

[Not a sales pitch - just answering the questions]

This AWS EC2 site is just an open-source project and site we maintain for the benefit of the community. So it's not directly our business but it promotes our brand and is just a helpful site that I think should exist. It's very popular and has been around for about 15 years now.

Our main business hosted on the main domain of https://www.vantage.sh/ is around cloud cost management across 25 different providers (AWS, Azure, Datadog, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) and the use-cases there about carving up one bill and showing specific costs back to engineers for them to be held accountable to, take action on, etc. Cloud costs and their impact on companies' margins is a big enough problem for vendors like us to exist and we're one player in a larger market.

Re: Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always strikes me that the best place of information for a cloud provider is not from that provider but a third party website. This is not a good comment for the cloud provider.

Funny story: When I was at AWS, I found that the easiest way automate instance data collection was by using the Vantage website code (it's on GitHub). The cobbler's children have no shoes.

Founder of Vantage here and former AWS employee.

We actually recently made the decision to staff someone full time on the site just to maintain it for the community. Even the JSON file for the site gets hit hundreds of thousands of times per day...feels like it's become kind of the de-facto source of truth in the community for where to get reliable AWS pricing information and I believe its powering a pretty remarkable amount of downstream applications with how much usage its getting.

We acquired the site almost 5 years ago and want to continue to improve it for the community. If you have any cloud cost management needs, we're also able to help for our main business here: https://www.vantage.sh/

Awesome to see all the comments on it here!

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