AWS Graviton4 Benchmarks Prove To Deliver The Best ARM Cloud Server Performance
For CPU-based 3D modeling with Blender, Graviton4 was driving renders much quicker than Graviton3 but for Blender 4.0 at least there was better performance still seen with Intel Xeon and then the best 64 vCPU performance with AMD EPYC.
For this initial testing I ran 48 benchmarks in full across the instances. When taking the geometric mean of all the raw performance benchmark results:
Wow. Going from Graviton3 to Graviton4 clocked in at 30% for the geo mean improvement... Precisely inline with what Amazon was promoting for Graviton4. It was great seeing my numbers matching up against their marketing claims at large for Graviton4. This 30% generational improvement allowed Graviton4 to come out about 5% faster overall than the Intel Xeon R7i instance. The AMD EPYC instance was still the fastest overall with around 25% greater performance overall, but when diving down into the specific benchmarks/workloads that outcome can vary.
After all the gains made by Graviton2 and Graviton3, Graviton4 exceeded my expectations with the continued generational gains achieved by Amazon. As a reminder, all of these instances were at 64 vCPUs... Now we are at the stage where the Neoverse-V2 cores with Graviton4 are effectively matching Intel Sapphire Rapids core-for-core and depending upon the workload also matching or outperforming AMD 4th Gen EPYC. Of course, Graviton4 just went GA this week and will be going up against AMD EPYC Turin and Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids in the coming months. That will be an interesting battle. Intel and AMD will likely take leadership there in at least raw performance while the performance per dollar will be interesting. It will be interesting as well to see if AWS can continue making such robust generational gains by the time of Graviton5. With AmpereOne being effectively M.I.A. this leaves AWS' Graviton4 easily at the forefront of ARM64 server processor performance.
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