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"AWS, the biggest of the existing cloud providers released an Arm-based offering in 2018 and now in 2019 catapults that offering to a world-class spot. With res

"AWS, the biggest of the existing cloud providers released an Arm-based offering in 2018 and now in 2019 catapults that offering to a world-class spot. With results comparable to x86-based instances and AWS’s sure ability to offer a lower price due to well known attributes of the Arm-based servers like power efficiency, we consider the new M6g instances to be a game changer in a red-hot market ripe for change." I'm not sure how that conclusion follows from the numbers presented? Yes, the new ARM processor has become much faster than the older one, but clearly looses against x86 in cpu-heavy benchmarks. Might be a good option for I/O limited workloads, as the NVMe storage is newer and therefore faster.

timthorn 7y ago
The A1 loses against the M5, but from my reading of the linked article the M6g matches the performance of an equivalent M5.
- aloknnikhil 7y ago
  The benchmarks in the article are bottlenecked by I/O. Definitely better than A1, though.
  - timthorn 7y ago
    Are you sure? The raw IO benchmarks presented in the article are higher in all dimensions for the M6g vs M5, so if IO was the bottleneck on the M5 I'd expect the M6g to move ahead.
  - glommer 7y ago
    They are not, they are all CPU-bound. Look at Figure4, that shows all CPUs at 100% utilization.
aloknnikhil 7y ago
Exactly. In fact, I'm sure there will be newer x86 instances paired with the new NVMe storage and the advantage is lost. Perhaps, the power saved is translated to cheaper instances. But I don't think it's worth the performance penalty.
- PeterCorless 7y ago
  Much of this depends on whether an app has true linearity in scale-out. If you can use horizontal scalability, you can get the same (or better) aggregate performance while, as you note, still reap savings both in power and dollars. Similar by analogy to how SSDs allowed you to get "good enough" performance for a database compared to all-RAM instances. You could still meet your SLAs and pocket the difference. It's a game changer in that way.
- glommer 7y ago
  Agree that the advantage on storage is no ARM-specific. It is what it is on AWS and we have shown that. But the whole point is that the Arm platform is doing great. The CPU comparisons matter more

timthorn 7y ago

The A1 loses against the M5, but from my reading of the linked article the M6g matches the performance of an equivalent M5.

aloknnikhil 7y ago
The benchmarks in the article are bottlenecked by I/O. Definitely better than A1, though.
- timthorn 7y ago
  Are you sure? The raw IO benchmarks presented in the article are higher in all dimensions for the M6g vs M5, so if IO was the bottleneck on the M5 I'd expect the M6g to move ahead.
- glommer 7y ago
  They are not, they are all CPU-bound. Look at Figure4, that shows all CPUs at 100% utilization.

aloknnikhil 7y ago

Exactly. In fact, I'm sure there will be newer x86 instances paired with the new NVMe storage and the advantage is lost. Perhaps, the power saved is translated to cheaper instances. But I don't think it's worth the performance penalty.

PeterCorless 7y ago
Much of this depends on whether an app has true linearity in scale-out. If you can use horizontal scalability, you can get the same (or better) aggregate performance while, as you note, still reap savings both in power and dollars. Similar by analogy to how SSDs allowed you to get "good enough" performance for a database compared to all-RAM instances. You could still meet your SLAs and pocket the difference. It's a game changer in that way.
glommer 7y ago
Agree that the advantage on storage is no ARM-specific. It is what it is on AWS and we have shown that. But the whole point is that the Arm platform is doing great. The CPU comparisons matter more