> I think the intel is better value. What are those graviton instances with better value (given that they are probably much slower than Intel)?

Intel instances are significantly more expensive when considering the cost for performance. In fact it's not even close [0].

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

The parent seemed to be specifically calling out Intel spot instances.

The key part being the cheapest available Graviton and Intel spot instances:

a1/32gb/16vcpu (early graviton) @ 8c and

versus:

M5zn/48gb/12vcpu (late Intel) @ 12c

Perhaps that will change as Graviton ages and availability changes.

> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/amazon-ec...

Fair enough - I was trying to provide some data showing that Graviton is on par and exceeds cost/performance value in some cases.

> Perhaps that will change as Graviton ages and availability changes.

Graviton isn't standing still - AWS bought Annapura labs in 2015, so while older versions of Graviton will obviously shift left in terms of it's value, AWS is going to continue to push in that direction. Graviton 3 was recently announced [0].

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/amazon-ec...

Mmh. Based on that Anandtech article, I guess the graviton2 cpus are actually similar in performance to intel ones. But still, my spot instance searches (especially also taking into account interruption frequencies), prices seem a bit of a wash. It doesn't look like Graviton is 40% cheaper. This may be different for on-demand or reserved pricing.

I wrote a framework that does regexes of the Common Crawl. The Common Crawl is a series of captures of billions of pages of the WWW. Each member in the series has ~60 TB captures.

My framework runs a fairly simple pipeline: for each 1GB file, stream it from S3, decompress it, search it with a regex library, stream results back to S3.

A1 spot instances have consistently been cheaper for this task when measured on a $/GB scanned basis. Part of this might be that the framework doesn't need lots of RAM, so paying for more than 2GB per core on the non-A1 instances is just wasted expense for me.

Wouldn’t a lambda be far cheaper?

In my experience, no. Quite the opposite.

Lambdas can be cost effective for bursty loads, but if you can push sustained CPU utilization, as this example does, EC2 is cheaper.

For example, an ARM-based Lambda with 2 GB of RAM running for 1 hour is $0.09. An a1.medium is $0.025/hr on-demand or $0.0084/hr spot.

Part of this is that Lambda scales your CPU performance with your memory usage. So even if your code can run in 128 MB of RAM, there's no cost benefit to you if it's CPU-constrained, because it will run 16x slower than if you allocated it 2048 MB of RAM.

It seems unclear, the Intel has fewer cores (6 vs A1's 8) and probably less memory bandwidth per core, but then each core would be faster than the Graviton1. You'd need to benchmark your specific workload to find out.

The a1.4xlarge has 16 cores, not 8. One of the sales pitches of the Graviton is that it has no SMT, so you get more predictable per-core performance.

Oops, yes, it's 16 cores vs 6.