I just ran some massive tests on our own CI. I use AMD Turin for this on gcp, which was noted as one of the fastest ones in the article.

The most insane part here is that the AMD EPYC 4565p can beat the turin's used on the cloud providers, by as much as 2x in the single core.

Our tests took 2 minutes on GCP, 1 minute flat on the 4565p with its boost to 5.1ghz holding steady vs only 4.1ghz on the gcp ones.

GCP charges $130 a month for 8vcpus. ALSO this is for SPOT that can be killed at any moment.

My 4565p is a $500 cpu... 32 vcpus... racked in a datacenter. The machine cost under 2k.

i am trying hard to convince more people to rack themselves especially for CI actions. The cloud provider charging $130 / mo for 3x less vcpus you break even in a couple months, it doesn't matter if it dies a few months later. On top of that you're getting full dedicated and 2x the perf. Anyways... glad to see I chose the right cpu type for gcloud even though nothing comes close to the cost / perf of self racking

Hetzner charge between €10 and €48 for an 8vcpu setup, depending on how many other users you're happy to share with.

For €104/mo you can get a 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D (basically identical to your 4565p) w/ 128GB DDR5, 2x2TB PCIE Gen4 SSD.

That's not to say you're wrong about dedicated being much better value than VPS on a performance per dollar basis, but the markup that the European companies charge is much, much lower compared to what they'd charge in the US.

In this instance you're looking at a ~17 month payback period even ignoring colo fees. Assuming a ~$100 colo fee that sibling comment suggested, you're looking at closer to 8 years.

> My 4565p is a $500 cpu... 32 vcpus... racked in a datacenter. The machine cost under 2k.

> The cloud provider charging $140 / mo for 3x less vcpus you break even in a couple months, it doesn't matter if it dies a few months later

How do you calculate break even in a couple months if the machine costs $2,000 and you still have to pay colo fees?

If your colo fees were $100 month you wouldn’t break even for over 4 years. You could try to find cheaper colocation but even with free colocation your example doesn’t break even for over a year.

I used to run a site that compares prices[0]. Not only is the ecosystem pull to the cloud strong, but many developers today look at bare metal as downright daunting.

Not sure where that fear comes from. Cloud challenges can be as or more complex than bare metal ones.

[0]: https://baremetalsavings.com/

> i am trying hard to convince more people to rack themselves especially for CI actions.

What do you think the typical duty cycle is for a CI machine?

Raw performance is kind of meaningless if you aren't actually using the hardware. It's a lot of up front capex just to prove a point on a single metric.

Yeah I expected this benchmark to include hosted "metal" hardware with the "per instruction cost" benchmark to see how provider like Hetnzer fare against classic AWS VMs. It's a bit apple to oranges I know, but I think nowadays is what most people compared pure performance cost are interested in. I'm not going to migrate from AWS VMs to GCP or Hetzner VMs, but I might be open to Hetzner hosted servers instead for a massive enough cost reduction.

You can go on OVH and get a dedicated server with 384 threads and a Turin cpu for $1147 a month. You have to pay $1147 for installation and the default has low ram and network speeds but even after upgrading those it's going to be 1/5 of what it would cost on public clouds.

Self-racking lets you rack a bunch of gear you'd never find in VM/dedicated rentals, like consumer parts or older, still very good parts. Overclocking options are available as well if you DIY.

If you need single-threaded performance, colo is really the only way to go anyway.

We have two full racks and we're super happy with them.

This is basically the premise of https://www.blacksmith.sh/ as far as I know, though without the need to host the hardware yourself and the potential complexity they comes with that.

"VCPUS" are a bit of scam in my experience. You usually don't get what the hardware (according to /proc/cpuinfo) is capable of.

A 16-core 4565p is of course faster in max single thread speed than a 96-core that GCP is running at an economically optimal base clock.

A year ago I gave a talk about optimizing Cloud cost efficiency and I did a comparison of colocation vs cloud over time. You might find it interesting here, linking to the relative part: https://youtu.be/UEjMr5aUbbM?si=4QFSXKTBFJa2WrRm&t=1236

TLDR, colocation broke even in 6 to 18 months for on-demand and 3y reserve cloud respectively. But spot instances can actually be quite cheaper than colocation.

You generally don't go to the cloud for the price (except if we are talking hetzner etc).

Both Datapacket & OVH have the 4565p.

This proc is a hidden gem.

For most workloads it’s not just the most performant, but also the best bang-for-buck.

Big cloud is ludicrously expensive. It’s truly amazing. Bandwidth is even worse. It’s like a 10000X markup.