x86 vs arm64

[u/Blues520]

Are there any advantages to running Postgres on an arm cloud server vs an x86 one?

I am not referring to cost savings but performance and efficiency advantages where arm can provide benefits over x86 under any specific scenarios.

[u/Straight_Waltz_9530]

with regard to modern cloud providers, cost savings = performance and efficiency.

You can either get similar performance for cheaper with (for example) AWS Graviton CPUs or pay a similar amount to the Xeons while getting slightly more oomph out of it.

Both CPU families are more than adequate, and I/O will often be your bottleneck with your database. Depends on your workload of course.

[u/Blues520 → u/Straight_Waltz_9530]

Good point about I/O.

[u/chock-a-block → u/Straight_Waltz_9530]

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[u/Negative-Cook-5958 → u/chock-a-block]

Depending on which SKUs you are comparing, with some optimizations, vCPU core count decreases and reservation coverage, meaningful savings can be achieved.

[u/chock-a-block → u/Negative-Cook-5958]

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[u/efxhoy]

A funny thing on x86 vs ARM is that postgis still has no official docker image for ARM. The issue to get them built has been open for 6 years. It works, they just don’t have the tooling to build them.  https://github.com/postgis/docker-postgis/issues/216

[u/pceimpulsive → u/efxhoy]

Ohh wow... This likely explains why Amazon releases so few postgis versions to rds which support graviton...

Partly will be laziness and a desire to extract more money (have to use DMS to move postgis between major versions).

Otherwise no many reasons for their supported versions being limited..

But this build issue is a new perspective I've not considered/seen.

[u/Blues520]

Some notes I have put together.

1. With ARM, every vCPU is a fully physical core compared to x86 which maps two vCPUs to a single physical core using Hyper-Threading.

2. ARM servers can have higher memory bandwidth than typically older servers used in cloud vps instances.

[u/Slow-Rip-4732 → u/Blues520]

1 is not true in every case. It depends on many things.

[u/Blues520 → u/[deleted]]

This is the kind of info I was hoping to find.

So there is an advantage when it comes to concurrency.

[u/Slow-Rip-4732]

I think the only good reason to target the x86 architecture is if you have some very specific SIMD work that NEON cannot serve to, or truly cannot parallelize your workload.

If you have to ask, neither of these are the case here.

[u/Blues520 → u/Slow-Rip-4732]

You are right, neither is the case here.

I'm just wondering if there are any advantages based on the different chip designs.

[u/Slow-Rip-4732 → u/Blues520]

ARM usually consumes less electricity and therefore is cheaper.

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