Performance Evaluation of Alibaba Cloud g9ae & u2a Instances with AMD EPYC™ “Turin” (Zen 5c) vs. g9i Instances with Intel® Xeon® “Granite Rapids” CPUs
Cloud instance architecture plays a crucial role in determining workload scalability, efficiency, and overall infrastructure performance. With the introduction of new x86-based Elastic Compute Service (ECS) generations, Alibaba Cloud continues to expand its portfolio with instances powered by the latest AMD EPYC™ “Turin” (Zen 5c) and Intel® Xeon® “Granite Rapids” processors. These advances enable enterprises to choose optimized configurations aligned with their compute and cost-efficiency goals.
This paper presents Infobell IT’s independent performance evaluation of Alibaba Cloud’s g9ae, u2a, and g9i instance families across 8, 16, 32, and 64 vCPU configurations. The study compares throughput, compute efficiency, and responsiveness across different CPU architectures - AMD EPYC™ “Turin” (Zen 5c) and Intel® Xeon® “Granite Rapids” - using a consistent and rigorous benchmarking methodology. Workloads tested include SPEC CPU®2017, SPECjbb®2015, Redis, MySQL TPC-C, FFmpeg, and NGINX, providing a balanced assessment of both real-world and synthetic performance scenarios.
The evaluation also highlights the u2a instance family, a flexible offering in Alibaba Cloud’s Universal (U) portfolio, which can be provisioned with different AMD EPYC generations. For this study, tests were conducted specifically on Turin-based (Zen 5c) u2a instances. All results were normalized against a common baseline to ensure fairness and transparency, offering a clear view of performance scaling across the g9ae, u2a, and g9i families.