Intel Ice Lake vs Sapphire Rapids on AWS

Historically, GPUs have been the preferred choice for computer vision training due to their high performance, but recent advancements in custom-designed CPUs, such as Intel's "Ice Lake" and "Sapphire Rapids," offer promising alternatives. The Intel c6i Ice Lake AWS Instance, powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, provides up to 15% better price performance than previous instances and features a balance of compute resources and cost, making it suitable for various compute-intensive applications. Meanwhile, the Intel Sapphire Rapids R7iz instances, which are built on 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, are designed for high-performance computing and AI workloads, boasting the highest performance per vCPU among x86-based EC2 instances. In benchmarking experiments comparing these CPU instances to GPU instances for computer vision inference, the Intel c6i.2xlarge instance showcased the best cost-to-performance ratio, though it did not achieve the highest inference speeds. The analysis suggests that while CPU instances like Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids offer cost-effective alternatives with fewer management complexities, GPU instances remain more suitable for achieving the fastest inference speeds.

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