First look at new E5.Flex instances on OCI

Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) new compute E5 instances based on 4th generation AMD EPYC Processors™ (Code-Named “Genoa”), compared to the previous generation of E4 with over 33%-better performance per core. The E5 VMs are priced at $0.030/h per OCPU (or $0.015 per core). It is 20% more expensive than E4 VMs, priced at $0.025/h per OCPU (or $0.0125 per core).

Oracle is claiming that compared to the current E4 offerings, E5 provides 21% uplift in price performance. E5.Flex instances support reboot resizing, so you can easily migrate from your existing E4.Flex instances to an E5.Flex instance of compatible shape. Preemptible instances are enabled on E5.Flex, with burstable instances and extended memory VMs to follow later. It is important to remember that preemptible instances are subject to some restrictions, i.e. it is not possible to stop, start or restart preemptible instances.

Let’s look closer at the CPU performance results of E5.Flex vs older generation instances: E4, E3 and A1 (arm64 architecture) as well as performance compared to the cost.

Benchmark of E5, E4, E3 and A1

All benchmarks have been conducted with 2 cores (nproc=2). For AMD-based instances, 1 OCPU=2 vCores, while for ARM-based, 1 OCPU=1 vCore.

sysbench cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 --threads=32 --time=60 run

Running the test with following options:
Number of threads: 32
Initializing random number generator from current time

Prime numbers limit: 20000

CPU speed:

   events per second: 1797.61

The results are summarised the following table.

It is clear that E5 is faster than E4. However, it is not a dramatic difference. Will the performance increase justify the higher? Let’s see the comparison.