Amazon EC2 M9g Instances

[diath]

No benchmarks. No FLOPs. No comparison to commodity hardware. I hate the cloud servers. "9 is faster than 8 which is faster than 7 which is faster than 6, ..., which is faster than 1, which has unknown performance".

[itomato]

You need to benchmark a new EC2 instance anyway. If it’s out of spec, burn it down and redeploy.

[oofbey]

As soon as they're publicly usable people benchmark them carefully. All currently available models have clear metrics.

[sebazzz]

Since it will be a virtual machine, its performance can be arbitrarily reduced.

[mmontagna9]

If you're interested in using them you should just bench them yourself.

[renewiltord]

Who exactly believes manufacturer benchmarks? Just go run your benchmarks yourself and pick. Price/performance is a workload thing.

[llm_nerd]

In Amazon's Graviton 5 PR they note that over half of all new compute capacity added to AWS over the past three years has been Graviton-based. That's an amazing stat.

It really is incredible how ARM basically commoditized processors (in a good way).

[Octoth0rpe]

Inversely, I think it's siloed things in somewhat unhealthy ways. We now have a number of vendors that sell/rent you machines that are not generally purchasable. I don't think we've seen too many negative consequences yet, but if things continue in this direction then choosing a cloud provider for a high performance application (eg, something you'll want to compile to machine code and is therefore architecture specific in some way as opposed to a python flask app or something), one may have to make decisions that lock one into a particular cloud vendor. Or at least, it will further increase the cost of changing vendors if you have to significantly tweak your application for some oddities between diff arm implementations at different hosting providers, etc.

I would much rather see some kind of mandatory open market sale of all cpu lines so that in theory you can run graviton procs in rackspace, apple m5 servers in azure, etc.

[re-thc]

> over half of all new compute capacity added to AWS over the past three years has been Graviton-based. That's an amazing stat.

Yes and maybe no. They do "cheat" in that internal / managed services often use Graviton where possible. It works out cheaper without the Intel / AMD "tax".

[HatchedLake721]

Pricing when? :(

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

[StratusBen]

https://instances.vantage.sh/ recently added alerts for any pricing changes on EC2, including newly launching new instances. The site rebuilds every 4 hours so it usually breaks the pricing news first. I have it on for myself and its super helpful just to see when AWS changes things.

[Disclaimer, I'm CEO of Vantage - the company that maintains the site]

[thewisenerd]

discussed a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191993

AWS introduces Graviton5–the company's most powerful and efficient CPU (14 comments)

[stevefan1999]

If only dedicated game servers could run on aarch64...

I've been experimenting FEX on Ampere A1 with x86 game servers but the performance is not that impressed

[Rohansi]

Doesn't help that Unity requires forking over a pile of cash just to build for Linux ARM ("Embedded Linux") and everything else is free.

[Artoooooor]

General purpose not AI specific? I can't believe it.

[jackling]

AWS has plenty of AI specific offerings for EC2. The P, G and Trn families hit a wide range of AI use cases. Why wouldn't they also offer a general purpose one for typical compute?

[bhouston]

Is there a list of Geekbench performance metrics for the various Graviton CPUs?

I need a reference point so I can compare it to Intel/AMD and Apple's ARM cpus.

Otherwise it is buzzwords and superlatives. I need numbers so I can understand.

[sciurus]

https://instances.vantage.sh/ shows coremark scores for each EC2 instance type.

[llm_nerd]

While the 5 variant isn't yet available outside of the preview, you can of course spin a 4 up and run geekbench yourself. Plenty of people have and you can find them in the GB DB. And of course most people spin up their specific workload to see how it compares.

Core per core it pales compared to Apple's superlative processors, and falls behind AMD as well.

But...that doesn't matter. You buy cloud resources generally for $/perf, and the Graviton's are far and away ahead on that metric.

[jit_hacker]

Didn't M8g just come out? Am I crazy?

[jcims]

Not crazy. They just have a pretty rapid release cadence for Graviton. New chips ~ every two years.

[DonHopkins]

Happy DEC-10 day, for those who celebrate!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Xz-xq-d4jKk

[nodesocket]

Excited for t5g instances to release... Eventually.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

So these are aarch64, right?

[adrian_b]

More specifically, the CPU cores in AWS Graviton5 are Neoverse V3 cores, which implement the Armv9.2-A ISA specification.

Neoverse V3 is the server version of the Cortex-X4 core which has been used in a large number of smartphones.

The Neoverse V3 and Cortex-X4 cores are very similar in size and performance with the Intel E-cores Skymont and Darkmont (the E-cores of Arrow Lake and of the future Panther Lake).

Intel will launch next year a server CPU with Darkmont cores (Clearwater Forest), which will have cores similar to this AWS Graviton5, but for now Intel only has the Sierra Forest server CPUs with E-cores (belonging to the Xeon 6 series), which use much weaker CPU cores than those of the new Graviton5 (i.e. cores equivalent with the Crestmont E-cores of the old Meteor Lake).

AMD Zen 5 CPUs are significantly better for computationally-intensive workloads, but for general-purpose applications without great computational demands the cores of Graviton5 and also Intel Skymont/Darkmont have greater performance per die area and power consumption, therefore lower cost.

[watermelon0]

Yes, Graviton chips are aarch64.

[dtf]

Good question! I read two different Amazon press releases on this but still had to come here for the answer. It seems strange they don't want to advertise the ISA of a compute product - does marketing think it might scare people away?

[1970-01-01]

>Best price performance

Don't they still offer free nano EC2s? This is not a better price than $0.

[Kwpolska]

The free tier for EC2 expires after a year, and the eligible t-family instances have low resources and extreme CPU throttling if you try to do anything more serious with them.

[yonisto]

Awhile back I was researching cloud instances for performance, And I noticed that AWS didn't have the latest generations of AMD/Intel. Which are far superior to Graviton 4.

It seems obvious to me that AWS using their market dominance to shift workloads to Graviton.

[xeornet]

I think Graviton would still be much more energy efficient though? (I'm not sure)

I believe the main motivator for AWS is efficiency, not performance. $ of income per watt spend is much better for them on Graviton.

[bhouston]

This sort of makes sense. If there is no competitive advantage in buying the latest AMD or Intel CPUs, why buy them when you can just deploy a generic (ARM licensed) CPU at cheaper prices.

The competitive advantage right now is in NVIDIA chips and I guess AWS needs all their free cash to buy those instead of non-competitive advantage CPUs.

[zokier]

At what point was that true? For example right now ec2 has granite rapids cpus available which are very much the latest and greatest from intel.

[vel0city]

I imagine it can take time to actually validate and build out that new infrastructure at scale after AMD/Intel announces these products to the market. It wouldn't surprise me if hyperscalers like AWS, Google, Microsoft, et. al. get a little bit of early previews of this hardware, but it still takes time to negotiate sales, buy the chips, and then actually receive the new chips and make actually useful systems.

Meanwhile, when AWS announces a new chip its probably something they have already been building out in their datacenters.

[jcims]

>Which are far superior to Graviton 4.

Not if you are looking at price/performance. AWS could be taking a loss to elevate the product though, no way to know for sure.