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Cloud VM Benchmarks 2026: AMD EPYC Turin Dominates 44 VM Types Across 7 Providers

Canopy Cloud

A comprehensive 2026 cloud compute benchmark comparing 44 VM instance types across AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, Akamai, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner found AMD EPYC Turin to be in a performance class of its own for single- and multi-threaded workloads. The benchmark, published by Dimitrios Kechagias on dev.to, tested CPUs including Intel Granite Rapids, Google Axion, Azure Cobalt 100, and Ampere AmpereOne M across multiple regions using DKbench, Geekbench 5, 7zip, nginx, FFmpeg, and OpenSSL. For best on-demand value, Oracle Cloud and Hetzner lead; for reserved pricing over 3 years, GCP Turin (n4d/c4d) and Azure Cobalt 100 (Dpls_v6) compete closely with OCI.

Key Takeaways

  • AMD EPYC Turin powers the fastest VM tested — AWS C8a.large (non-SMT, $88.94/mo on-demand) — with multi-thread scores nearly double its predecessor C7a
  • Intel Granite Rapids (AWS C8i, GCP c4-lssd) delivers stable performance improvement over inconsistent Emerald Rapids; ARM leaders are Google Axion (c4a) > AWS Graviton4 > Azure Cobalt 100
  • Hetzner CPX22 (AMD Genoa, ~$8.63/mo shared) and OCI AmpereOne M A4 offer best on-demand performance/price; AWS is consistently worst value on-demand across all pricing tiers

Original source: dev.to / Dimitrios Kechagias