Amazon's Arm-based Graviton2 Against AMD and Intel: Comparing Cloud Compute
by Andrei Frumusanu on March 10, 2020 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Servers
- CPUs
- Cloud Computing
- Amazon
- AWS
- Neoverse N1
- Graviton2
Compiler Setup, GCC vs LLVM
For further performance testing of the systems, we fell back to SPEC2006 and 2017. I wanted to make sure that there’s no heated discussions when it comes to the compilation of the test suites, so carefully investigated the compilers out there, particularly regarding the choice between GCC and LLVM.
Overall, I checked three different compiler setups: A freshly compiled GCC 9.2.0 release, Arm’s Allinea Studio Compiler 20 package which comes with both Arm’s closed source LLVM and Flang variants as well as a pre-compiled version of GCC 9.2.0, and Marvell’s branch of LLVM and Flang.
We had seen quite a push by Arm for us to consider GCC more closely than LLVM, as Arm had admitted that they’ve spent more time upstream optimising GCC than they’ve had for LLVM. Given the much more prevalent use of GCC in cloud and datacentre applications, I did somewhat agree with this given that’s most likely what you’ll see people use in such environments.
I ran some single-threaded tests across the different compiler setups, the compiler flags were straightforward with just a simple -Ofast flag as well as -march/-mcpu=cortex-a76 or =neoverse-n1 (alias) for the Arm compiler setup.
As always, our SPEC results aren't officially submitted results, and thus we have to label them merely as "estimates" for this article. Furthermore, SPEC2006 has been retired in favour of SPEC2017, but I still wanted to put up the figures for historical context, as well as mobile comparisons.
Graviton2 SPEC - Single Threaded - 2.5GHz
The overall results favour GCC in the SPECint workloads, while LLVM seemingly does better in the FP and memory heavy tests. Between the upstream GCC 9.2.0 and Arm’s precompiled version there’s seemingly no performance difference whatsoever, while there is some minor difference between Marvell’s setup and Arm’s branch of LLVM.
I ended up going forward with a clean compile of GCC 9.2.0 both for the Arm as well as x86 systems – meaning we’re using the exact same compiler for both architectures, just with different compile targets.
For x86, we’re again using the simple -Ofast flag for optimisations, and using the corresponding -march/-mtune targets for the EPYC and Intel platforms, meaning zenver1 and skylake-avx512.
Overall, it’s a bit odd to see GCC ahead in that many workloads given that LLVM the is the primary compiler for billions of Arm devices in the mobile space. Arm has said that they’re trying to put more effort into this compiler as seemingly it’s lagging behind GCC in terms of some optimisations.
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SarahKerrigan - Tuesday, March 10, 2020 - link
That single-thread performance is extremely impressive. The multithreaded scaling is ugly, though. Back when N1 was announced, ARM seemed to think 1MB/core was a good spot for Neoverse LLC - I wonder why both Graviton and Altra are going for considerably less.shing3232 - Tuesday, March 10, 2020 - link
it's gonna costly（die and power wise） to build a interconnect for 64C with good performance. by the time, it would lost its power/perf edge I suppose.Tabalan - Tuesday, March 10, 2020 - link
Scaling might not be optimal, but performance loses are to expected if you greatly reduce available cache. In the end, MT performance is still far ahead of competition.ballsystemlord - Thursday, March 12, 2020 - link
You have to remember that the competition is not 64 cores, but 64v cpus. The difference is 60% or more. The Arm Graviton2 is being placed into the best possible light by this comparision.ballsystemlord - Thursday, March 12, 2020 - link
I mean 60% for the cores that are actually 1 thread. As in, the performance boost by turning on SMT is 40% best case scenario.autarchprinceps - Sunday, October 25, 2020 - link
I have to disagree. You seem to forget that the arm chip is cheaper. It’s an additional win if it manages to integrate more cores and yet still achieve a comparable single threaded performance. It’s not unfair to compare two products with one seeming to have a stat advantage from the start, if it’s still cheaper or costs the same. Why should a customer care?zamroni - Thursday, March 12, 2020 - link
L caches uses sram which needs 6 transistors per bit.So, every 1MB needs all least 48 millions transistors without counting transistors for the controller
dianajmclean6 - Monday, March 23, 2020 - link
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Comparisons made are to the whole core performance of Graviton to just thread performance of Xeon/EPYC. It's very problematic.Also TDP rating for the graviton is off by 50% based on what was reported at re:Invent.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, March 10, 2020 - link
I go over the core/SMT topic in the article, it's only a problem from a hardware comparison aspect, but it's very much the correct comparison from a cloud product offering comparison. The value proposition also does not change depending on core count, the instances are priced at similar tiers.