[harpratap]

We did a migration from GCP's Intel based E2 instances to AMD's T2D instances and saw huge 30% savings in overall compute! It is similar amount of savings folks got from switching to AWS Graviton instances, so looks like AMD might keep the x86 ISA still alive

[jeffbee]

E2 is just extremely old. E2 are a mixed fleet that contain CPUs as old as Haswell. Haswell launched over 10 years ago. It makes sense that you get a better bang for your buck from using something that isn't gravely obsolete. You should also keep that in mind when benchmarking E2, since it's a grab-bag of CPUs you need to control for the actual CPU type, either by specifying the minimum one you require or assuming the worst.

[harpratap]

That is true. But in cloud our hands our tied, we cannot really switch from one one generation to another so easily. GCP has so far never launched a new chip while keeping the price same or lower. We did same cost/perf analysis on newer generation chips like Ice Lake from Intel and even Milan from AMD in the form of N2D, but both are quiet expensive for the performance uplift they provide. The unique thing about T2D is that the price is competitive with 10 year old E2, which has been the case only for ARM based CPUs like Graviton and Ampere Altra (T2A from GCP)

[jeffbee]

I get what you mean. For the record, here's a GCP engineer holding forth on price/performance ratios who also concludes that T2D is optimal. https://medium.com/google-cloud/google-cloud-platform-cpu-pe...

ETA: Since you are using Go and targeting a specific modern CPU, you may also get a measurable benefit from setting GOAMD64=v3, so the go compiler generates code using AVX2, BMI2, LZCNT, etc.

[harpratap]

Thanks, that's a really insightful article!

> Since you are using Go and targeting a specific modern CPU, you may also get a measurable benefit from setting GOAMD64=v3

That's actually a long pending open issue in our backlog :)