I'm curious to hear about your experiences with migrating workloads over to ARM CPUs. What challenges did you face during the process? Also, did you notice a significant cost savings in terms of performance?
3 Answers
Generally, Linux workloads can migrate pretty smoothly. I've been running a bunch of stuff at home on affordable ARM machines—like quad-core devices with 4-8GB of RAM—all under $100. It's been pretty good for basic tasks!
What exactly is an ARM CPU?
I've managed to save around 20% after migrating. If you're considering, I'd recommend Cobalt over Ampere. Just keep in mind that with AMD64, each CPU thread is counted as a vCPU, thanks to hyper-threading, but ARM CPUs don't have this feature right now. So, on ARM, if you have 8 vCPUs, that equates to 8 physical cores, which gives you more reliable performance under load. Also, I'm not entirely sure if AKS supports ARM, but RedHat OpenShift allows for mixed ARM64 and AMD64 worker nodes in the same cluster.
Just a heads up, some extensions like ARC won't work in an ARM cluster. The native AKS does support ARM, but there are limitations.
Remember that some AMD families, like Fa v6 and H-series VMs, also operate with one vCPU equating to one core since they have SMT disabled.
Sure, booting a Linux OS is fine, but the real challenge comes with package management, especially for compute-heavy tasks like data science. While I'm rooting for the ARM migration, it’s still a watch-and-see situation.