AWS M5A (AMD EPYC) Performance Comparison

This is the time-honoured Linux kernel benchmark.

Preparation was simply unzipping the 4.20-rc3 tarball from kernel.org, running "make menuconfig" and immediately saving the config (no changes) and then make -j 4.

This was on Amazon Linux 2, with a 40GB GP2 EBS block storage volume.

AMD EPYC m5a.xlarge:

time tar zxf linux-4.20-rc3.tar.gz
real0m6.109s
user0m5.928s
sys0m2.838s


time make -j 4
real18m31.421s
user66m52.071s
sys5m54.968s

Intel Xeon Platinum m5.xlarge:

time tar zxf linux-4.20-rc3.tar.gz 

real0m4.693s
user0m4.688s
sys0m1.767s

time make -j 4
real14m4.332s
user49m12.569s
sys5m44.682s

So there we have it: on a kernel compilation, one run, the Intel instance completed the kernel compilation 25% faster.