Snowflake Gen1 vs. Gen2: A Performance & Cost Analysis

Introduction 

As cloud data warehousing becomes more critical for modern organizations, choosing the right compute resources is essential for balancing performance and cost.

This article provides a detailed comparison between Snowflake’s GEN1 and GEN2 SMALL warehouse configurations using real-world workload metrics. 

Context 

Snowflake recently released their “Next Generation” virtual warehouse, Gen2, focused on improving performance for analytics and data engineering workloads. Gen2 is built on top of faster underlying hardware and intelligent software optimizations, such as enhancements to delete, update, and merge operations, and table scan operations. 

For this benchmark test, we processed 1.5 billion rows against 2 sample datasets Accounts & Orders. 

Performance Comparison 

For the GEN2_SMALL warehouse, the workload was completed in 16 minutes and 24 seconds (0.2734 hours). While GEN1_SMALL took 21 minutes and 55 seconds (0.3653 hours).  

This translates to GEN2 completing the workload ~5.5 minutes faster, a 25% improvement in execution time (see below). 

Cost Analysis 

While GEN2_SMALL has a higher hourly cost (2.7 credits/hour vs. 2.0 credits/hour for GEN1_SMALL), its faster execution results in nearly identical total costs of the workload. 

For the above test, the following costs were (see figure 2): 

• GEN2_SMALL: $1.48 

• GEN1_SMALL: $1.46 

Figure 2

Conclusion – Which One Should You Choose 

Choose GEN2_SMALL if: 

• Workloads are performance sensitive 

• Faster query execution delivers business value 

• You prefer Snowflake’s latest technological advancements 

Choose GEN1_SMALL if: 

• Workloads are batch-oriented and not time-sensitive 

• You are focused purely on minimizing immediate credit consumption 

• Cost control is a higher priority than performance  

Summary 

In summary, GEN2_SMALL warehouses provide an excellent balance between performance and cost-efficiency. While GEN2_SMALL warehouses incur a slightly higher hourly rate, they offer significant performance improvements that lead to faster query execution and nearly equivalent costs. Making GEN2 a strong candidate for workloads where time-to-insight is critical and data teams require rapid query turnaround.