Ampere Altra vs. Amazon Graviton2 Linux Performance Benchmarks

Last month we provided benchmarks of Ampere Altra against Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC with the Q80-33 CPUs in a 2P / 160 core configuration. From that article, reader questions were raised about how this high performance ARM server chip compares to Amazon's Graviton2 processors, so in this article today are such benchmarks. The Graviton2 via an AWS m6g.metal instance with 64 cores was compared to the Ampere Altra Q80-33 in its 2P 160 core configuration, 1P 80 core configuration, and then a 64 core configuration to match the Graviton2 by disabling the excess cores.

Graviton2 as announced just over one year ago features 64 cores based on Arm Neoverse N1 and clock frequencies up to 2.5GHz. Ampere Altra is also based on Neoverse N1 but with the current flagship Q80-33 model allows for a 3.3GHz clock frequency for its 80 cores.

Our straight-forward testing today is looking at the Graviton2 performance via the m6g.metal instance against the Ampere Altra Q80-33 processors in the Mt Jade server. The Ampere Altra server was tested in 64 / 80 / 160 core configurations for matching the Graviton2 core count and then showing the 1P/2P capabilities of this high performance ARM server.

For this round of benchmarking, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was used on both platforms with the stock GCC 9.3 compiler and other default package versions of this current Ubuntu Long Term Support release. Via the Phoronix Test Suite an assortment of different benchmarks were carried out for seeing how these competing ARM server chips compare.