Amazon EC2 推出 AMD 版本的 C5a 主機

前幾天 AWS 宣佈了使用 AMD CPU 的 c5a 主機:「New – Amazon EC2 C5a Instances Powered By 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors」。

定價上與其他 AWS 上 AMD 的機器都類似 (m5ar5a 以及 t3a),大約都低 10% 左右:

Today, I am excited to announce the general availability of compute-optimized C5a instances featuring 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors, running at frequencies up to 3.3 GHz. C5a instances are variants of Amazon EC2’s compute-optimized (C5) instance family and provide high performance processing at 10% lower cost over comparable instances.

以這兩年 AMD 在 CPU 這塊碾壓 Intel 的情況來說 (AMD YES!),目前 AMD CPU 上唯一的缺點應該是單核的時脈比較低,這在捉機上的領域裡面來說,遇到一些沒有做好多核最佳化的遊戲時 Intel 的表現會比較好,其他的情況其實都可以看出 AMD 幹爆 Intel。

如果你在 AWS 上跑的應用程式也有類似需要吃單核效能,無法充分使用多核環境時,還是可以回頭看一下 c5 系列,頻率會高一些:

C5 and C5d instances feature either the 1st or 2nd generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series processor (Skylake-SP or Cascade Lake) with a sustained all core Turbo CPU clock speed of up to 3.6 GHz. The new C5 and C5d 12xlarge, 24xlarge, and metal instance sizes feature the 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) with a sustained all-core Turbo CPU frequency of 3.6GHz.

說到這個,Linus 前陣子在發表 5.7-rc7 的時候也說換了 AMD 的 3970x,整個處理 kernel 編譯的速度是用倍數在改善:「Linux 5.7-rc7」:

In fact, the biggest excitement this week for me was just that I upgraded my main machine, and for the first time in about 15 years, my desktop isn't Intel-based. No, I didn't switch to ARM yet, but I'm now rocking an AMD Threadripper 3970x. My 'allmodconfig' test builds are now three times faster than they used to be, which doesn't matter so much right now during the calming down period, but I will most definitely notice the upgrade during the next merge window.

回到 AWS 這邊... 目前有提供的區域來說,歐美比較大的區域都在首發清單,台灣這邊比較常用的東京還沒有看到,不過公司在用的新加坡上了:

You can launch C5a instances today in eight sizes in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions in On-Demand, Spot, and Reserved Instance or as part of a Savings Plan.

如果沒有什麼特別成本壓力的人,可以等一陣子看看有沒有其他人丟效能測試出來,看看 CPU 的計算能力是不是可以無痛換過去... (這邊是相較於 ARM 那邊)