Question

What are the risks and considerations when moving from an Intel vCPU to AMD?

Posted on March 26, 2021
DigitalOcean Droplets
Asked by Jamie Burchell

Looking at the new Premium CPU options and it seems looking at benchmarks that AMD outperforms the Intel offering at the same price point.

I see it’s not possible to automatically resize to an AMD vCPU from an Intel vCPU with the reason cited as “some things might break”. But, a method is suggested where a droplet snapshot can be created and deployed on a new droplet to achieve the switch, so I’m a bit confused as to why this isn’t provided as a resize option, at least with a warning.

Assuming that we are talking about a CentOS 7.x web server with nothing compiled from source, with standard packages being used and no known application code making use of specific CPU features - what are the risks and considerations when switching?

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Mandi Fuller

DigitalOcean Employee

• April 15, 2021

Accepted Answer

Hi @jamieib3! Thanks for the question. I can understand the confusion here.

DO has placed the restriction on resizing to avoid any edge cases (in addition to the ones that we’ve highlighted in the docs), that may result in performance degradation or application failure. Assuming nothing is compiled from source and no specific CPU features are being used, there is likely little-to-no risk of taking a Snapshot of an Intel-based Droplet and deploying it for an AMD-based Droplet. Taking a Snapshot also ensures that if your resized Droplet doesn’t perform as expected, you can re-deploy on an Intel-based droplet.

We may change the logic and option for resizing in the future as we continue to evaluate the product and how customers use it, but that’s not definite at this time.

I hope this provides a little bit of insight. Let me know if you have more questions :)

faizanzad • August 3, 2021

i moved my intel droplet to AMD after taking snapshot of the intel one, but now in my AMD droplet, no resize options are available, and now if i want to upgrade/resize my AMP droplet, i have no other option rather than taking full snapshot of current AMP droplet and create a new AMP with higher specs droplet from the snapshot… is this the right way to do ?

i dont see any resize options on my AMP droplet now, did i make a mistake? i use discourse and they said AMP cpu perform better thats why i moved to AMP but now if i cannot resize it to higher specs on AMP what else can i do>? @mbarton plz help me