Phoronix paints a very different picture, especially in non-synthetic workloads[1]. Gravitron2 looks like a nice speedup over the first generation but either the optimization isn't there yet or there are areas which need additional work to become more developer/HPC competitive. That said, I'm thrilled we have competition in the architecture space for general purpose compute again.[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-...
_msw_|5 years ago
My personal opinion is that the Phoronix way places quantity over quality. Measuring performance is an important part of shining a light on where we can improve the product, but I get little practical information from those numbers, even when they are reported as non-synthetic. There are HPC workloads that are showing significant cost advantages when run on C6g, like computational fluid dynamics simulations. See [1].
I expect the scalability of HPC clustering to improve on C6g in the future, like C5n improved cluster scalability compared to C5 with the introduction of the Elastic Fabric Adapter. The Phoronix and Openbenchmarking.org approach doesn't give much insight into workloads like this.
My advice for an audience like folks on HN is is to test it for yourself. For me, being able to run my own experiments is how I come to understand infrastructure better. And the cloud lowers the barrier of running those experiments significantly by being available on-demand, just an API call away. I'd love to hear what you think, either in a thread here or you can contact me via addresses in my user profile.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/c6g-openfoam-better-pri...
DCKing|5 years ago
karkisuni|5 years ago
Still would be interesting to know what differences caused the gap in results, but their setups were pretty different.