Impact of runtime encryption on compute performance

All nodes in a Constellation cluster are executed inside Confidential VMs (CVMs). Consequently, the performance of Constellation is inherently linked to the performance of these CVMs.

AMD and Azure benchmarking

AMD and Azure have collectively released a performance benchmark for CVMs that utilize 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors (Milan) with SEV-SNP. This benchmark, which included a variety of mostly compute-intensive tests such as SPEC CPU 2017 and CoreMark, demonstrated that CVMs experience only minor performance degradation (ranging from 2% to 8%) when compared to standard VMs. Such results are indicative of the performance that can be expected from compute-intensive workloads running with Constellation on Azure.

AMD and Google benchmarking

Similarly, AMD and Google have jointly released a performance benchmark for CVMs employing 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors (Milan) with SEV-SNP. With high-performance computing workloads such as WRF, NAMD, Ansys CFS, and Ansys LS_DYNA, they observed analogous findings, with only minor performance degradation (between 2% and 4%) compared to standard VMs. These outcomes are reflective of the performance that can be expected for compute-intensive workloads running with Constellation on GCP.