Hariharan Iyer and Abhishek Srivastava run some tests against AWS’s new AMD-powered EC2 instances:
Our summary findings from TPCDS benchmarks are as follows:
– TPCDS queries are not as sensitive to local disk performance (and hence to EBS volume sizes)
– r5 (Intel) instances are consistently faster than r5a (AMD) instances. However, the speedup depends on the engine and the speedup for r5 (Intel) is lower for Spark (10%) than for Hive (25%).
– r5 instances are also either cheaper (by about 10% for Hive) or the same cost (for Spark)
At least for Hadoop and Spark work, Intel CPUs are a bit better, but there is some nuance in the story so check it out.