Over the last decade, we mostly stopped talking about CPU performance. Recently, however, there has been a seismic and exciting change in the CPU landscape, due to innovation by a chip company called Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). It is important to understand this shift, because applying this knowledge to your business can help you earn more money.
First, Some Background
Now more than ever, opportunity really does coalesce on these newer generations of hardware where the combination of so many simultaneous advances is taking place.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that came to be known as Moore’s Law. He stated that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. For a long time, this held true — which helps explain why, for almost the whole history of computing, significant performance gains were seen in available processors every few years.
Gradual gains worked fine for a time. Due to poor leadership, however, the world’s largest processor company fell asleep at the wheel and stayed that way for a long time. While Intel is now working very hard to catch up, over the past decade or more, the company’s CPUs offered only very minor performance gains year-over-year.
Intel did produce power savings along the way, and also began to increase core counts, but mostly they lowered the gigahertz speed of each core, sometimes adding more cores. The net result was that the Intel’s CPUs were not really any faster than what clients were using previously, especially if they didn’t do enough research and bought the wrong models.
Tech Innovations Hit Warp Speed
Advances in CPU technology can be put into perspective using examples from the hosting world. Up until 2022, most hosts were selecting Intel processors, which even today remain the most common choice in data centers. However, AMD’s market share is growing as its CPU performance and competitive prices help it gain traction.
Now, the punch line. An entry-level server from yesteryear, which was smart enough to run a whole small paysite program as a single server, is comparable to today’s next-generation medium-sized virtual private server (VPS) offerings. What used to be the fastest servers sold are now the same speed as a larger VPS, providing incredible speed gains even when there are fewer cores.
Cloud Viability Is Now Truly Viable
New VPS and cloud offerings using AMD EPYC, or especially AMD Ryzen CPUs, have become a truly viable alternative to dedicated servers. With advanced functions and modest prices, these servers are significantly faster than previous generations because they leverage a whole suite of newer technologies.
It’s true that not all cores are created equal. This year’s Intel Xeon Gold 6526Y is still 25% slower than an AMD Ryzen 7950X released two years ago — and in the next few months, the next generation of AMD Ryzen 9000 and EPYC 4004 is anticipated to be another 15% faster. If your server is Intel-based and more than a few years old, choosing a new AMD system could yield performance gains of up to 800%.
These examples help to explain the technology gap out there. New cloud platforms are using AMD EPYC processors, which offer incredibly high performance, with models like the EPYC 9654 processor doubling the performance of the Ryzen 7000 series and improving on older Intel Xeons by 600-2,000%.
The important takeaway here is that technology has leapfrogged ahead, and you can leverage these advances to improve your site performance.
Unpacking the Particulars of Available Offerings
Understanding exactly which processor your sites would benefit from most can still be a somewhat complex calculation. For example, if you purchase a cloud or VPS instance using smart technology such as AMD EPYC from one provider, it might be dramatically slower than a similar instance from another provider. This is because some cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), use two of these processors per node. The addition of a second processor to the server actually delivers a diminishing performance return of 20% faster, not the 100% additional performance your logic might expect, resulting in dramatically lower results per CPU core when the count is doubled.
A great free web site that I have relied on to compare CPU performance for over a decade is CPUbenchmark.net. This PassMark software benchmark is an excellent general gauge of both single and multithread CPU performance, and it is one that I trust when I do research to compare new and old technology.
Cloud Performance Comparisons
Lastly, it’s important to understand how different cloud instances stack up to non-cloud options, such as VPS or dedicated servers. The fastest cloud instances available today from AWS can vary significantly in cost and performance compared with VPS and dedicated server platforms.
The difference is so dramatic that my research has shown various cloud options perform slower even with twice the CPU cores. The differences in price can also be large, with cloud instances costing as much as 300% more — even while providing lesser performance — and charging 2,000% more for bandwidth. As a buyer, you must understand exactly what you are purchasing because not all servers, networks, data centers or employee training are equal in the marketplace.
Reviewing your use of technology in real-world scenarios can help you make smart decisions about what to do next. For many site owners, “fast” is fast enough, and it’s not guaranteed that migrating to the latest and greatest hardware will yield increased profits. The reflexive choice is often to spend more money on new technology, but while “dialing in” requirements and determining the right size can be more challenging, it can also ultimately prove more pragmatic.
Upgrading out of older software stacks and leveraging newer technologies always benefits site owners, however, with improvements in versions that provide increased speed, reliability and security. Regardless of whether more processing power is needed, newer server hardware can leverage the best of everything. Faster system memory and fourth-generation NVMe storage is incredibly beneficial, because it’s a tenfold improvement over solid-state disks (SSDs).
Storage no longer has to be every server’s bottleneck, while your server’s CPU is waiting on storage to respond. To take advantage of all the best technology, it’s critical to choose the right processors in your cloud instance, VPS and dedicated servers. Now more than ever, opportunity really does coalesce on these newer generations of hardware where the combination of so many simultaneous advances is taking place.
Going Green
These newer generations of hardware, combining so many simultaneous advances, can also offer unexpected opportunities — including environmental benefits. If you want to do your part saving the planet, consider changing your hosting technologies approximately every five years or so. If you’re currently using any combination of dedicated servers, consider switching to smart virtualized private servers or cloud technologies, as they will yield a performance gain over what you have today, while using significantly less power.
Brad Mitchell is the founder and president of MojoHost, which has served the industry for nearly two decades and has been named XBIZ Web Host of the Year several times. He regularly shares insights as a panelist at trade shows. Contact brad@mojohost.com to learn more about the suite of services his company offers.
