Amazon Web Services : M5 Vs M5a Vs M6g - Cloud Mercato

Amazon Web Services : M5 vs M5a vs M6g

In other words Intel vs AMD vs ARM. AWS recently released Graviton series for all their main instance types: R6g with extended memory, C6g for compute optimized and M6g for general purpose. Their offering has always been based on Intel but in the past years we saw AMD and now with Graviton 2 making AWS is based on their own chips. Amazon Web services announces their Graviton processors as a new choice for their customers for increase their performance for a lower cost. But what's the difference between all these solutions identical on the paper ? Let's do CPU benchmark to answer it.

Specification

For our benchmark, we took 8CPU-32GB VM from each series:

Product	Price	CPU	Frequency
m5.2xlarge	0.38	Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8175M Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8259CL	2.5-3.2GHz
m5a.2xlarge	0.34	AMD EPYC 7571	2.4-3.0GHz
m6g.2xlarge	0.31	aarch64	N/A

These data are collected by our Cloud Transparency Platform, prices are for us-east (N. Virginia) region.

Performance testing

Prime number search with sysbench CPU

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Sysbench CPU can be categorized as arithmetic operations on integer.

We can observe an increase of +100% on single thread and close to 400% between M5 and M6g with 8 threads.

Encryption with AES-256 CBC

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"value": 1145877447.68, "verbose": "1.1 GB"}, {"x": 4, "y": 3, "value": 1151451021.6533334, "verbose": "1.2 GB"}, {"x": 0, "y": 4, "value": 143657186.98666665, "verbose": "143.7 MB"}, {"x": 1, "y": 4, "value": 287213794.9866667, "verbose": "287.2 MB"}, {"x": 2, "y": 4, "value": 574636941.6533333, "verbose": "574.6 MB"}, {"x": 3, "y": 4, "value": 1148484266.6666667, "verbose": "1.1 GB"}, {"x": 4, "y": 4, "value": 1154986548.9066668, "verbose": "1.2 GB"}, {"x": 0, "y": 5, "value": 143667653.97333333, "verbose": "143.7 MB"}, {"x": 1, "y": 5, "value": 287343501.65333337, "verbose": "287.3 MB"}, {"x": 2, "y": 5, "value": 574482932.0533334, "verbose": "574.5 MB"}, {"x": 3, "y": 5, "value": 1148550258.3466666, "verbose": "1.1 GB"}, {"x": 4, "y": 5, "value": 1155030512.64, "verbose": "1.2 GB"}, {"x": 0, "y": 6, "value": 143416067.41333333, "verbose": "143.4 MB"}, {"x": 1, "y": 6, "value": 286824849.06666666, "verbose": "286.8 MB"}, {"x": 2, "y": 6, "value": 573729798.8266667, "verbose": "573.7 MB"}, {"x": 3, "y": 6, "value": 1146394840.7466667, "verbose": "1.1 GB"}, {"x": 4, "y": 6, "value": 1152561940.4800003, "verbose": "1.2 GB"}], "borderWidth": 1, "color": "#f7981d", "borderColor": "#f7981d", "dataLabels": {"enabled": true, "format": "{point.verbose}"}}], "tooltip": {"enabled": true, "useHTML": false, "headerFormat": "", "pointFormat": "<span style=\"color:{series.color}\">Rate</span>: <b>{point.verbose}/sec</b>", "footerFormat": "", "shared": false, "outside": false, "valueDecimals": null, "split": false}}, "hc_type": "chart", "id": "140016605525608"}

Where AMD's performance depends of block size, Intel and Graviton are homogeneous across sizes. The ARM chip is able to encrypt at 1.2 GB/sec where the M5 and M5a respectively cap at 400MB/sec (200%) and 900MB/sec (130%).

Price

Product	Hourly	Monthly (estimation)	Yearly (estimation)	Discount
m5.2xlarge	0.38	280	3,360	—
m5a.2xlarge	0.34	251	3,012	-11%
m6g.2xlarge	0.31	224	2,688	-22%

Monthly is based on 730 hours, yearly on 8,760 hours without long term subscription

Prices make no doubt, each new generation offers a lower cost and M6g owns the lowest.

Conclusion

Depending of your workload, Graviton offers until +400% of performance compared to the Intel analogous. Combined with a lower pricing, M6G is definitively the best EC2 choice for any CPU related workload compatible with ARM architecture.

Check out data in our Public Cloud Reference

m5.2xlarge m5a.2xlarge m6g.2xlarge