
Amazon EC2 C5a Instances Powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC Processors Now Available - _msw_
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-c5a-instances-powered-by-2nd-gen-amd-epyc-processors/
======
pella
"Benchmarks Of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC On Amazon EC2 Against Intel Xeon, Graviton2"

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-
ec2...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-
ec2-c5a&num=1)

~~~
diroussel
interesting that the ARM processor cmae out fastest in at least three of the
benchmarks. I knew ARM was good, but to beat Xeons and EPYC is fantastic.

~~~
th3typh00n
Amazon defines one ARM vCPU as one core and one x86 vCPU as one SMT-thread of
one core, so the Graviton 2 instances has twice as many cores as the x86 ones
it's compared against, and as such it would be a kind of a failure if it
wasn't faster in some of the most heavily threaded workloads.

------
gundmc
AWS behind Azure, GCP, and even Oracle Cloud in this release. Azure had EPYC
Rome available 6 months ago. Surprising, AWS had been among the fastest to
roll out new hardware in the past few years.

~~~
markgavalda
Mostly Intel hardware though if I'm not mistaken?

~~~
gundmc
Yeah, we'll have to see how quickly the various providers are able to get EPYC
Milan GA'ed once it's available.

~~~
_msw_
Disclosure: I work for AWS building cloud infrastructure

My experience working at Amazon has changed my thinking about how to deliver
great customer experiences. When we make a new EC2 instance available,
customers expect to be able to use it at scale that is indistinguishable from
limitless (which is a challenge in a world that has physical constraints in
accordance to laws of physics), instantaneous availability, and high quality.
This requires significant infrastructure deployment scale and careful design
and management of supply chains. Not every provider has the same philosophy
and approach in practices.

------
dabinat
Even though the announcement says it’s available in US-East, it seems like you
can only launch in us-east-1a and us-east-1b. I wasn’t able to launch c5a
instances in other availability zones.

~~~
gregoryl
Something to be aware of, sub regions (a/b/c etc) do not map between accounts.
Your a might be my c, etc.

~~~
bdsa
That's a good point. They used to be the same across accounts, but then they
had consistent capacity problems in us-east-1a so they introduced the shuffle
which is determined on account creation.

You can actually look in the "Resource Access Manager" to determine which
allocation you've got, it maps the names you see in the rest of the console to
e.g. use1-az1, use1-az2, use1-az3, so you can use that information to
"colocate" things if you really need to.

------
KenoFischer
Is there a timeline for _soon_ on the metal instances?

~~~
ksec
Do metal instances launch at the same time with Intel or is it normal to
launch a little later?

~~~
_msw_
Disclosure: I work at AWS building cloud compute infrastructure

Historically we have both launched .metal instances at the same time as
virtualized instances, and also launched them a little later. My goal is to
launch them at the same time, but sometimes there are some final details to
work through before we can make them available.

