DigitalOcean Premium Intel (2 GB) vs. DigitalOcean Premium AMD (2 GB)

vs.

My friend, I'm so glad you're here! Today I spun up fresh instances from DigitalOcean to run some benchmarks on. Each instance was spun up with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 and all resided in or around the New York / New Jersey area. Enough talk. Here's the data.

Overview

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Last Benchmarked Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:08:17 GMT Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:11:17 GMT
Linux Distro Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64
Kernel Version 7.0.0-27-generic 7.0.0-27-generic
MySQL Version 8.4.10-0ubuntu0.26.04.1 8.4.10-0ubuntu0.26.04.1
Redis Version 8.0.5 8.0.5
Location New York, NY New York, NY
Monthly Price $16.00 $14.00
RAM (GB) 2 2
CPU Cores 1 1
Storage (TB) 70 50
Storage Type NVMe NVMe
Transfer (TB) 2 2

Head-to-head

Category winners from the latest benchmarks.

CategoryWinner
CPU (events/sec)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Memory (read MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Disk I/O (MiB/s)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
MySQL (read/write tps)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Redis (GET/sec)DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB)
Value (CPU events per $/mo)DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) takes 4 of 6 categories.

CPU

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Vendor GenuineIntel AuthenticAMD
Model Name DO-Premium-Intel DO-Premium-AMD
Clock Speed (MHz) 2,494.14 1,996.25
CPU Cache Size (KB) 4,096.00 512.00
BogoMips 4,988.28 3,992.50
Events per Second 599.47 726.05
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.98 0.64
Average Latency (ms) 1.67 1.37
Maximum Latency (ms) 12.39 12.5
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.91 2.57

Memory

Memory Read

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Operations per second 4,940,116.70 3,124,321.03
Mebibytes per second 4,824.33 3,051.09
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 0.44 3.2
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

Memory Write

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Operations per second 4,629,786.72 5,198,576.87
Mebibytes per second 4,521.28 5,076.74
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0 0
Maximum Latency (ms) 3.05 2.33
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

File I/O

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Reads per Second 3,843.72 1,786.48
Writes per Second 2,562.48 1,190.99
Fsyncs per Second 8,204.64 3,820.35
Read Mebibytes per Second 60.06 27.91
Written Mebibytes per Second 40.04 18.61
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.07 0.15
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.02 15.23
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.21 0.54

Mutex

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Minimum Latency (ms) 1,668.13 1,705.40
Average Latency (ms) 1,673.77 1,717.24
Maximum Latency (ms) 1,680.60 1,725.62
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1,678.14 1,739.68

MySQL

MySQL Read-only

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 8,428.00 7,218.00
Queries per second 84,280.00 72,180.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.02 1.2
Average Latency (ms) 1.18 1.38
Maximum Latency (ms) 6.54 2.84
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.7 1.67

MySQL Write-only

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 9,581.00 4,665.00
Queries per second 95,810.00 46,650.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.74 1.12
Average Latency (ms) 1.04 2.14
Maximum Latency (ms) 8.19 24.52
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.37 3.43

MySQL Read/Write

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 3,903.00 2,351.00
Queries per second 39,030.00 23,510.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 1.98 2.54
Average Latency (ms) 2.56 4.25
Maximum Latency (ms) 11.22 29.54
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 3.25 6.21

MySQL INSERT

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 15,461.00 7,702.00
Queries per second 154,610.00 77,020.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.45 0.73
Average Latency (ms) 0.64 1.3
Maximum Latency (ms) 10.02 39.5
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.92 2.22

MySQL Bulk INSERT

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 1,317,592.00 1,317,592.00
Queries per second 13,175,920.00 13,175,920.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0 0
Average Latency (ms) 0.01 0.01
Maximum Latency (ms) 355.01 403.62
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0 0

MySQL SELECT

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 239,595.00 161,910.00
Queries per second 2,395,950.00 1,619,100.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.03 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.04 0.06
Maximum Latency (ms) 1.38 1.19
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.05 0.09

MySQL SELECT (Random Points)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 5,471.00 5,673.00
Queries per second 54,710.00 56,730.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.62 0.55
Average Latency (ms) 1.83 1.76
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.61 5.81
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 2.43 2.48

MySQL SELECT (Random Ranges)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 7,700.00 7,133.00
Queries per second 77,000.00 71,330.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.43 0.45
Average Latency (ms) 1.3 1.4
Maximum Latency (ms) 4.19 5.08
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 1.73 1.89

MySQL UPDATE (Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 15,377.00 7,358.00
Queries per second 153,770.00 73,580.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.45 0.76
Average Latency (ms) 0.65 1.36
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.09 32.59
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.9 2.22

MySQL UPDATE (Non-Indexed)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 16,540.00 7,941.00
Queries per second 165,400.00 79,410.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.44 0.73
Average Latency (ms) 0.6 1.26
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.98 24.84
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.83 2

MySQL DELETE

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
Transactions per second 129,377.00 67,880.00
Queries per second 1,293,770.00 678,800.00
Minimum Latency (ms) 0.04 0.05
Average Latency (ms) 0.08 0.15
Maximum Latency (ms) 5.6 18.82
95th Percentile Latency (ms) 0.13 0.94

Redis

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
PING_INLINE per Second 74,850.30 68,306.01
PING_MBULK per Second 75,075.07 67,294.75
SET per Second 72,202.16 66,979.23
GET per Second 71,174.38 68,352.70
INCR per Second 68,027.21 66,225.16
LPUSH per Second 67,114.09 67,024.13
RPUSH per Second 71,377.59 68,728.52
LPOP per Second 65,189.05 67,340.07
RPOP per Second 66,934.41 67,521.95
SADD per Second 70,521.86 69,589.42
HSET per Second 71,174.38 67,430.88
SPOP per Second 71,479.62 69,252.08
ZADD per Second 68,587.11 69,252.08
ZPOPMIN per Second 72,358.90 68,212.83
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements) per Second 33,167.50 36,023.05
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements) per Second 17,540.78 18,308.31
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements) per Second 12,242.90 12,436.26
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements) per Second 10,551.86 10,716.96
MSET (10 keys) per Second 62,421.97 55,679.29

Redis Average Latency (ms)

DigitalOcean – Premium Intel (2 GB) DigitalOcean – Premium AMD (2 GB)
PING_INLINE0.420.46
PING_MBULK0.420.46
SET0.440.48
GET0.440.46
INCR0.470.48
LPUSH0.480.47
RPUSH0.450.46
LPOP0.490.48
RPOP0.480.47
SADD0.450.45
HSET0.450.47
SPOP0.440.45
ZADD0.470.46
ZPOPMIN0.440.46
LRANGE_100 (first 100 elements)1.010.96
LRANGE_300 (first 300 elements)1.831.83
LRANGE_500 (first 500 elements)2.732.78
LRANGE_600 (first 600 elements)3.063.09
MSET (10 keys)0.650.73

Conclusion

From the friendly robots:

The DigitalOcean Premium Intel (2 GB) instance outperforms the Premium AMD (2 GB) in most benchmarks, particularly excelling in Redis operations and MySQL bulk inserts with higher requests per second and lower latencies, indicating superior performance for CPU-intensive tasks. Notably, the Intel instance achieved 74,850 RPS in Redis PING_INLINE compared to the AMD's 68,306, and delivered 130,521 TPS in MySQL bulk inserts versus AMD's 131,166. For applications prioritizing CPU performance and low latency for database operations, the Intel instance is the better choice.

From the friendly human:

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