Benchmarking Basics — what the numbers actually mean
Synthetic vs real-world, throughput vs latency, p50 vs p99, the traps that produce lies, and a glossary for the whole series.
A practical, cited path through cloud compute benchmarking in 2026. Start with what the numbers mean, see who actually wins across AWS / Azure / GCP / OCI, zoom into the AMD price-performance duel, then learn to benchmark your own workload so the decision is yours — not a leaderboard's.
Synthetic vs real-world, throughput vs latency, p50 vs p99, the traps that produce lies, and a glossary for the whole series.
A cited synthesis across AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI — Axion vs Graviton4 vs Cobalt vs EPYC Turin, memory bandwidth, real workloads, cost-performance, and a verdict table.
Same EPYC silicon: AWS a touch faster (Nitro), OCI ~44% cheaper on-demand for near-identical runtime. Intel skipped — too pricey. Plus the spot/reserved wrinkle.
Define the metric, build a representative test, control every variable, run many times, and rank by performance-per-dollar at your prices. A method you own.