CloudPanel for AWS Graviton is now available!
AWS goes all-in on Arm-Based Graviton2 processors with EC2 6th generation instances, developed by the 2015 acquired company Annapurna Labs.
AWS announced that its M6g instances offer up to "40% higher performance at 20% lower cost equating to a 40% improved price/performance" than its own M5 instances.
The AWS Graviton2-based instances is the second Arm-Based version, which provides 4x the vCpus, 7x CPU performance, ~2x performance/vCPU, ~30 Billion transistors than the first A1 version.
We have worked hard to make CloudPanel ready for AWS's arm architecture, providing you the best price-performance for your money.
What is Graviton?
The Graviton processors are personalized built for Amazon Web Services. It is built using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to provide the maximum price performance for the cloud workloads deployed on Amazon EC2. The Amazon EC2 serves the most in-depth and widest range of compute instances. The range includes instances that are fueled by state-of-the-art AMD and Intel processors. The Graviton processors add more flavor to the mix and grant an increased number of options to the customers for better performance and cost for the workloads.
The Amazon EC2 A1 instances are powered by first-generation Graviton processors. It happens to be the very first Arm-based instance on Amazon Web Services. The Amazon EC2 A1 instances are capable of providing drastic cost savings as compared to traditional instances for scale-out purposes like containerized microservices, data/log processing, web servers, and different workloads which can deploy on smaller cores and suffice within the memory footprint available.
The updated Graviton2 processors are advanced considerably in terms of functionalities and performance compared to the initial Graviton processors. The processors fuel Amazon T4g, C6g, R6g, and M6g ec2 instances, and the variants via local NVMe-powered SSD storage. It provides enhanced price performance by 40% in comparison to present generation x86-fueled instances. This is applicable for a wide portfolio of workloads, like microservices, application servers, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source database, in-memory caches, and high-performance cloud computing.
The latest processors also can serve better performance for hardware acceleration to compression workloads, video encoding workloads, and supporting machine learning inference for CPU-based devices. The processors have five times faster memory, twice the caches, four times the computing cores and seven times enhances performance.
Why is Graviton a game-changer?
The processors are predicted to be a game-changer in the industry, with a 40% better price/performance as compared to x86 instances. AWS had recently announced making memory-optimized R6g and compute-optimized C6g generally available. The latest general purpose M6g, R6g, and C6g instances have better performance than the previous x86 M5, R5, and C5 instances types. This is a drastic advancement over the present x86 Amazon EC2 C5 instances and is thus the main reason for Graviton's outing. All three instances are individually available in the nine instance types and also have metal instance types.
Why Graviton is Green - Less energy consumption
It is well-known that Arm processors are the leaders in low power operations as mobile computing happens to be one of their most critical market segments. Reduced power decreases cost and thus the major reason these processors have enhanced price/performance solution for a given workload. In the present scenario, x86 instances are likely to win against a single thread performance; however, CPU bound operations will win in terms of non-parallel single threads performance. Graviton2 isn't slow or weak. ASTRA, an Arm-based supercomputer, was bought by the Department of Energy earlier. The Department plans workloads focused on the Cavium Thunder and the memory processor. It has incredible memory interconnect performance and thus ends up providing superior performance.
What means Graviton for the future of PHP?
AWS is working together with the PHP community to drive major improvements to the performance of the PHP software stack.
By using graviton2 instances, the latest release of PHP 7.4 currently experiences up to 37% faster execution time compared to the previous PHP 7.3 version.
This significantly lowers the cost of running PHP Apps such as WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, Drupal, and others on Graviton2 based instances.
A better Zend optimizer for Arm64
The Zend optimizer is a component of the PHP runtime system that improves performance by up to 30% on a range of Zend micro-benchmarks. Before PHP 7.4, the Zend optimizer was not enabled for Arm. AWS added Arm64-specific implementations to several functions of the PHP interpreter.
Future developments
PHP 8 will be released in 2021 with more improvements for Arm64: an improved toupper/tolower function brings performance up by 16.5.
PHP 8 is being released with a new JIT compiler that optimizes the PHP byte-code in the Opcache. The Just-In-Time Compiler is currently developed on x86 and is based on Lua's JIT. As Lua’s JIT supports ARM64, AWS is working with PHP developers to enable and to tune the Opcache JIT in PHP 8 to get the best performance on Graviton processors.
Benchmarks
We have measures the performance impact of the software changes to the PHP interpreter by running the standard micro-benchmarks distributed with the Zend optimizer: bench.php and micro_bench.php.
The benchmark was run on a 4 vCPUs Graviton2 M6g.xlarge and a 4 vCPUs Intel M5.xlarge instances on a server fully loaded with a CPU utilization of over 75%. Between PHP versions 7.3 and 7.4, the execution time of M6g instances improved by up to 37%.
In the next benchmark, we have tested a blank WordPress installation's scalability to see how it performs on the M5.xlarge and M6g.xlarge instances. With PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0.0 we were able to serve about 18% more requests per second.
Combined with the 20% lower cost of M6g instances, running PHP 7.4 and WordPress provides up to 34% better price/performance on M6g vs. M5 instances.
Conclusions
Big companies like Apple and AWS are going all-in with Arm-based instances because they are faster and consume less energy than Intel/AMD processors.
We see that PHP runs up to 40% faster on the AWS Graviton than on the Intel-based instances in the benchmarks.
On top of the performance enhancements, the AWS Graviton processors are about 20% cheaper than the Intel ones.
To get started with ARM you only need to create an aws account.
It is no coincidence that the world's fastest supercomputer Fugaku is also using Arm-based processors.
