Dual AMD EPYC 7601 Processor Performance and Review Part 1

[Patrick Kennedy]

Our dual AMD EPYC 7601 processor performance and review part 1 featuring legacy and current generation Intel Xeon CPUs for comparison

The post Dual AMD EPYC 7601 Processor Performance and Review Part 1 appeared first on ServeTheHome.

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[MiniKnight]

@Patrick VERY GOOD

I've been waiting for this for a long time.

At STH we have a view of the platform informed by the fact that we have around 30% of all AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Scalable 1P and 2P SKU’s covered by the CPUs in our lab, along with about two dozen legacy configurations online.

Have anything to do with this? Same pic? STH Project Xavier - Placeholder

Explains what has you so busy.

 

[Edu]

Nice article.
I compared with results that you did earlier on the Dual 8180/8176 and they seem to trade blows with the Epyc. Most of the scores are about the same, with Epyc winning a few and the Xeon's winning a few.

 

[zir_blazer]

HELL YEAH. I have been waiting since July 2006 to see AMD rocking charts. These results are even better that I though, just look at the size of those bars!
Save for the per Core licensing issue, Epyc is a really, really strong contender. The Infinity Fabric seems to be doing quite well considering that a Dual Epyc is roughly a 8 Sockets topology, and at a high level it looks like it scales well enough.

There are two things that I was left pondering: Supposedly, the Xeons E7 (Which should be now the Platinum) had more RAS features than the E5. How much of a feature parity there is between Epyc and the new Xeons in RAS, or between the Xeons Silver/Gold/Platinum themselves now that they use the same platform?
The other is that Epyc seems to do exceptionally well in legacy applications, but when AVX-512 gets into play, Epyc (And previous Intel generations) lags behind by a significant margin. I suppose that a break point will be around the Xeons Gold 51xx line and the 61xx, due to the 1 vs 2 AVX-512 units.
The comparison with the Quad Platinums in AVX-512 is rather misleading since for a Dual it should be around half of that. At first I though that with AVX-512 Skylake-E was utterly demolishing anything, but when I noticed it was Quad Skylake-E vs Dual Epyc, it seems it will be by 50% and not that mindblowing 200%.

 

[Patrick]

The comparison with the Quad Platinums in AVX-512 is rather misleading since for a Dual it should be around half of that. At first I though that with AVX-512 Skylake-E was utterly demolishing anything, but when I noticed it was Quad Skylake-E vs Dual Epyc, it seems it will be by 50% and not that mindblowing 200%.

The Xeon Gold 6132 was left in there. That is a $2111 MSRP chip. Notice where that is.

On the 4P system, even if you take half, still doing well but remember, the 4P system is seeing significant scaling issues that are due to the model size. Hard to get one model to scale from Atom to 4P so that is why we are splitting it into multiple tests.

 

[Edu]

There are two things that I was left pondering: Supposedly, the Xeons E7 (Which should be now the Platinum) had more RAS features than the E5. How much of a feature parity there is between Epyc and the new Xeons in RAS, or between the Xeons Silver/Gold/Platinum themselves now that they use the same platform?

I think AMD have all the RAS features that Intel has (full list here:
http://www.amd.com/system/files/2017-06/AMD-EPYC-Brings-New-RAS-Capability.pdf)
The difference is the AMD has them enabled on everything, even Ryzen Pro, while Intel only have them on certain high end CPUs.

 

[zir_blazer]

The Xeon Gold 6132 was left in there. That is a $2111 MSRP chip. Notice where that is.

On the 4P system, even if you take half, still doing well but remember, the 4P system is seeing significant scaling issues that are due to the model size. Hard to get one model to scale from Atom to 4P so that is why we are splitting it into multiple tests.

I didn't noticed that the Gold was there since I just looked at the top results and the Gold is rather low profile at around the middle of the table, was expecting it above Epyc. But, if that's a single Gold 6132, then I suppose that Dual would put it around twice that.
So basically, for AVX-512, the Xeons stomps Epyc both in performance and price-performance.

Awaiting Part 2.

 

[Evan]

One other thing to take into account and I don't know if it works in AMD or Intel favor is lifetime costs, i.e. Power consumption over 4 years say can be a huge difference I am guessing.

 

[Patrick]

It is much lower on retail systems than I would have thought. Still awaiting an apples-to-apples features/ PSUs/ cooling comparison but the deltas are not crazy.

 

[Evan]

It is much lower on retail systems than I would have thought. Still awaiting an apples-to-apples features/ PSUs/ cooling comparison but the deltas are not crazy.

I actually had a thought in high core counts it may be to AMD advantage even.

In my world I can't see a reduced per core IPC fly for a lot of the apps we run, and for oracle and sql server the license is a killer.
But once we do some comparisons and get the competitive largeish volume purchasing we will see where we end up.

 

[realtomatoes]

those cores make me drool.

true enough those per core licenses are gonna get scrutinized a lot in our environment too. fortunately, got word they are removing all oracle VMs from my vcenters, so that's one less thing to worry about.

would also be nice to see these on nutanix's SKU.