With Amazon recently launching their M8a AWS instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin”, for their M8 class instance types there now are all the latest-generation CPU options with AMD EPYC Turin (M8a), Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids (M8i), and their in-house Graviton4 processors (M8g). After recently looking at the M7a vs. M8a performance with Amazon EC2, many Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing an M8a vs. M8i vs. M8g performance showdown so here are those benchmarks.
Today’s article is a performance and value showdown between AMD EPYC Turin, Intel Xeon Granite Rapids, and Graviton4 in the Amazon EC2 cloud. The “4xlarge” instance size was used across all three M8 instances tested for providing 16 vCPUs and 64GB of RAM for each of the different instances tested. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the Linux 6.14 kernel and GCC 13.3 were also running on each of the instances tested. A nice straight-up comparison of AMD Turin, Intel Granite Rapids, and AWS Graviton4 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS at the same vCPU count for a very interesting comparison.
The performance-per-dollar was also explored in being a key aspect of cloud computing. With the m8g.4xlarge its on-demand price is the best at $0.718 per hour while the m8i.4xlarge was at $0.847 USD per hour and the new EPYC Turin instance the most expensive at $0.974 USD per hour. It is worth noting though with the AMD m8a instance are all physical cores without SMT / sibling threads while the M8i Granite Rapids instance for its vCPU counts the physical core plus the sibling thread of Hyper Threading.
Graviton4 as a reminder uses Arm Neoverse-V2 cores. The m8i.4xlarge instance was using the Intel Xeon 6975P-C processor, again 8 cores plus Hyper Threading is how AWS arrives at 16 vCPUs. And then there is the new m8a.4xlarge instance using the AMD EPYC 9R45 processor.
From there I ran over 140 benchmarks to explore how AMD Turin, Intel Granite Rapids, and Graviton4 were competing in the AWS cloud at the same vCPU size and using all the same software components from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for this straight-forward cloud performance comparison.
