Oracle Cloud Ampere A1 CPU Benchmarks
ARM CPUs have been all the craze for the past few months now, especially from the development of Apple’s M1 MacBook, which are power-efficient while still being really quite powerful. So, in this article, I’ll be benchmarking Oracle Cloud’s Ampere A1 CPUs, to see how they hold up against more traditional offerings.
Oracle Cloud has been offering “Always Free” instances with up to 4 Ampere A1 ARM cores and 24 GB RAM — shareable among up to 4 virtual machines. So, I wondered, how do they stack up against AMD’s x86–64 more traditional offerings?
So, for this, I have chosen 2 instances from Oracle Cloud:
- VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro
- 1 core of an AMD EPYC 7551 32-Core Processor
- 1 GB RAM
- VM.Standard.A1.Flex
- 1 core of an Ampere A1 CPU
- 1 GB RAM
Check out other instance “shapes” here.
Benchmarks
So, I ran Sysbench-CPU on both machines, using an unlimited number of threads for both. It is important here to note that AMD’s offering does allow for hyperthreading, so our 1 core is actually 2 logical threads. This feature is not available on the Ampere A1 CPU, so keep this in mind.
We see that the Ampere A1 CPU beats the AMD alternative in every case, by a very large margin in all tests. In the 5000 max prime limit test, we see the A1 CPU having more than 6.5x the performance of the AMD CPU, and this is even seen in the higher max prime limits, where the A1 CPU is over 6 times the performance of the AMD offering.
Hence, based on this data from the benchmark, we can make the conclusion that A1 CPUs are miles ahead of AMD CPUs when it comes to this type of arbitrarily high intensity workload. However, keep in mind that the benchmarks here are NOT comprehensive, and only really cover one type of (truthfully) quite unrealistic workloads — so take these results with a grain of salt.
Conclusion/Verdict
The Ampere CPUs are quite far ahead in the computational power provided per core, at least in the operations demanded by Sysbench. In benchmarks, the 6x performance of the A1 CPUs compared to the AMD CPUs offers great insight into the promise of ARM as the future of CPUs.
