Achieve 58% Better Estimated SPECrate®2017_fp_base Performance than m6a Instances with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors
When an organization relies heavily on complex workloads involving floating-point calculations, it’s imperative that those workloads get the performance they need to run smoothly. The cloud offers advantages in flexibility and manageability, but there are hundreds of possible cloud solutions—which is the right fit for such a workload?
Intel tested the estimated floating-point performance of two sets of instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS):
- m6i instances featuring 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors
- m6a instances featuring 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors
Intel used the SPECrate®2017 Floating Point suite of benchmarks for these measurements, with higher estimated SPECrate®2017_fp_base performance indicating that the instance could handle more floating point computations in the same amount of time. To highlight performance advantages as the instances scaled, Intel tested both sets of instances with 4 vCPUs, 8 vCPUs, and 16 vCPUs. Across all three sizes, the m6i instances provided greater estimated SPECrate®2017_fp_base performance, indicating that m6i instances may be a wiser choice for complex floating-point workloads.
See Better Estimated SPECrate®2017_fp_base Performance on Small Instances
At the smallest size Intel tested, the m6i instances with 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors delivered 18% more estimated SPECrate®2017_fp_base performance than the m6a instances with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors.
See Better Estimated SPECrate®2017_fp_base Performance on Medium-Size Instances
Figure 2 highlights the increase in estimated SPECrate®2017_fp_base performance on 8-vCPU m6i instances—enabled by new 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors—compared to equivalent m6a instances with AMD EPYC processors.
See Better Estimated SPECrate®2017_fp_base Performance on Larger Instances
As Figure 3 shows, the most significant performance boost for m6i instances came at the largest size instance, 16 vCPUs. In this test, the m6i instances featuring 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors outperformed the m6a instances with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors by 58%.
As the size of the instance increased, so did the difference in floating-point performance between m6i instances with new Intel processors and m6a instances with AMD processors. Particularly for complex workloads running on larger instances, organizations could benefit from selecting m6i instances enabled by 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
Learn More
To get started running your floating-point workloads on AWS m6i instances enabled by 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, go to https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m6i/.
Tests performed by Intel on Oct. 2021-Jan. 2022. All Intel configs: Intel Xeon Platinum 8375C CPU @ 2.90GHz, AWS us-east-2, EBS 512GB, up to 10Gbps network BW, up to 12.5Gbps storage BW, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS Kernel 5.11.0-1022-aws, cpu2017 v1.1.8, ICC 2021.4 revB_8GBqkmalloc, -xCORE-AVX512, ic2021.1-lin-core-avx512-rate-20201113_revB.cfg. All AMD configs: AMD EPYC 7R13 Processor, up to 12.5Gbps network BW, up to 6.6Gbps storage BW, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS kernel 5.11.0-1022-aws, AOCC 3.0, -march=znver3, aocc3.0-lin-znver3-rate-published-20210317.cfg. xlarge VMs: 4 cores, 16GB RAM, 4 workload copies; 2xlarge VMs: 8 cores, 32GB RAM, 8 workload copies; 4xlarge VMs: 16 cores, 64GB RAM, 16 workload copies.