I'm surprised how bad xeon scales to 8 cores. But isn't the xeon instance the only one not running bare metal?? Maybe he is paying for 8 cores but gets only 2-4 physical cores?
That "Xeon" is a very old (10-year old) quadruple-core (8-thread, i.e. 8 "virtual CPUs") desktop Haswell CPU rebranded as "Xeon". A current Intel NUC Pro with a Core i3 CPU would be a much faster (67% faster ST, 43% faster MT) dedicated server than this one and it would cost to own less than $500 with DRAM and SSD, so about $8 per month for a 5-year lifetime (so the performance per $ would be at least 5 to 6 times higher than that of the compared Intel server).
That "Xeon" is a good comparison point only because it was available for them in the same price range, not because it would be representative for the performance of any modern x86 CPUs. Also the "Epyc" is probably a very old model.
Somebody who wants to spend their money for cloud services as efficiently as possible should better ensure that it is possible to migrate back and forth their applications between x86 and ARM instances, because which one is cheaper for a certain performance at a given time depends a lot on non-technical reasons, so it is unpredictable which will be cheaper a few months later.
@kramerger
No, Xeon Server is a dedicated server(a.k.a Bare metal), I've looked at it's console and found it's Dell PowerEdge R220(Motherboard Dell Inc. 081N4V).
I'm quite confused about it's performance as well.
CPU Info
Name Intel Xeon E3-1230 v3
Topology 1 Processor, 4 Cores, 8 Threads
Your link is wrong, it points to an E3-1230 (v1) from 2011 (Sandy Bridge), while the tested CPU was E3-1230 v3 from 2013 (Haswell).
Decoding the Intel product names requires experience, because one or two letters or digits added or deleted can change very much the characteristics of the product. Two such products differing in one letter might have a five times difference in performance.
Not that it matters much, because even an only 10-year old CPU is still ancient.
That "Xeon" is a good comparison point only because it was available for them in the same price range, not because it would be representative for the performance of any modern x86 CPUs. Also the "Epyc" is probably a very old model.
Somebody who wants to spend their money for cloud services as efficiently as possible should better ensure that it is possible to migrate back and forth their applications between x86 and ARM instances, because which one is cheaper for a certain performance at a given time depends a lot on non-technical reasons, so it is unpredictable which will be cheaper a few months later.