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The author makes it pretty clear this isn't a comparison of ARM vs. x86 but with the specs being nearly identical, I'm finding it very hard not to draw that con
by booi 6y ago
The author makes it pretty clear this isn't a comparison of ARM vs. x86 but with the specs being nearly identical, I'm finding it very hard not to draw that conclusion. The difference is even larger when you factor in the cost difference.
Are there other factors that could explain the large performance gap?
- chrischen 6y agoI think what they mean is that there are enough non-CPU differences that you can't make this an accurate comparison. That being said at the end of the day the ARM instances are cheaper and better performing—whatever the reason may be.
- wmf 6y agoThe SSD is clearly different. Are there other differences, or are people just assuming?
- random5634 6y agoBut the non CPU differences (compiler / linker / OS optimizations), number of drives etc - all seem to favor x86?
- random5634 6y agoCost is a key factor. It should be trx/$. That really makes clear the ARM advantage here. Additionally the ARM version only had one disk vs two for x86. I also feel like there is more headroom for optimization now that ARM is more visible as a server class target in the non-postgresql toolchains.
- Thaxll 6y agoIt's a wrong measurement because not all workload can be "shardable". If your workload is bound to a single instance it does not really matter if it's a bit cheaper. Not every workload are behind a loadblancer, so single core / MT / single instance performance can be important.
- hrez 6y ago> the specs being nearly identical graviton2 are real cores while amd/intel is SMT vCPU's. So 2x real cores difference.
- STRML 6y agoSure, but it's also 20% cheaper to get the ARM setup, so I don't think it's fair to discriminate this way. In the end what matters is what I can buy, and ARM both offers more cores per socket and per dollar.
- llampx 6y agoPossibly once AWS has gotten enough people switching to Graviton CPUs, they would start raising the cost.
- teej 6y ago“Would” is a bold word choice given that AWS hasn’t ever raised prices. Could, can, might - sure.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI don't think that would work out for them. Most code that runs on AArch64 will run just as happily on AMD64. Few of their customers are going to be writing AArch64 assembly.
- greatpatton 6y agoThe cost here is an artificial variable as it completely under the control of AWS. They can decide to sell them very cheap to lock people on AWS.
- vorpalhex 6y agoYes but porting to other ARM nodes isn't difficult, and if you're already using AWS you're comfortable with a fair bit of lock-in already.
- 6y ago