The most interesting thing to me is the difference between the results from a year ago. The top scores are 1/3rd of what they were a year ago.
They changed the test rig from an i7-2600K to a Dual Xeon ES-2660v2. Those 4 cores at 3.4ghz destroy the 20 cores at 2.2ghz.
Cloud performance in comparison is terrible. That i7 hits 290k fortunes compared to the cloud VM hitting 30k. You need ~$1500 of VM a month ($0.23 / hour / 30 days / 9) to match a desktop computer from 2011.
After Round 12, we had to find a new physical hardware environment. ServerCentral [1] stepped up and provided some (older) physical hardware for the project. However, the new hardware doesn't match the performance of previous rounds.
The physical hardware for each round has been [2]:
They changed the test rig from an i7-2600K to a Dual Xeon ES-2660v2. Those 4 cores at 3.4ghz destroy the 20 cores at 2.2ghz.
Cloud performance in comparison is terrible. That i7 hits 290k fortunes compared to the cloud VM hitting 30k. You need ~$1500 of VM a month ($0.23 / hour / 30 days / 9) to match a desktop computer from 2011.