Upfront they say: "It should be noted that Kinvolk has ongoing cooperation with both Ampere Computing and Packet, and used all infrastructure used in our bench

Upfront they say: "It should be noted that Kinvolk has ongoing cooperation with both Ampere Computing and Packet, and used all infrastructure used in our benchmarking free of charge. Ampere Computing furthermore sponsored the development of the control plane automation used to issue benchmark runs, and to collect resulting data points, and to produce charts." I'm not saying anything was intentionally done, but optimizations were likely done on the Ampere side.