AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review: A Peak vs Per Core Performance Balance
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Andrei Frumusanu on March 15, 2021 11:00 AM ESTDisclaimer June 25th: The benchmark figures in this review have been superseded by our second follow-up Milan review article, where we observe improved performance figures on a production platform compared to AMD’s reference system in this piece.
SPEC - Single-Threaded Performance
Single-thread performance of server CPUs usually isn’t the most important metric for most scale-out workloads, but there are use-cases such as EDA tools which are pretty much single-thread performance bound.
Power envelopes here usually don’t matter, and what is actually the performance factor that comes at play here is simply the boost clocks of the CPUs as well as the IPC improvement, and memory latency of the cores. We’re also testing the results here in NPS1 mode as if you have single-threaded bound workloads, you should prefer to use the systems in a single NUMA node mode.
Generationally, the new Zen3-based 7763 improves performance quite significantly over the 7742, even though I noted that both parts boosted almost equally to around 3400MHz in single-threaded scenarios. The uplifts here average over a geomean of +25%, with individual increases from +15 to +50%, with a median of +22%.
The Milan part also now more clearly competes against the best of the competition, even though it’s not a single-threaded optimised part as the 75F3 – we’ll see those scores a bit later.
In SPECfp, the Zen3 based Milan chip also does extremely well, measuring an average geomean boost of +14.2% and a median of +18%.
The new 7763 takes a notable lead in single-threaded performance amongst the large core count SKUs in the market right now. More notably, the 75F3 further increases this lead through the higher 4GHz boost clock this frequency optimised part enables.
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mode_13h - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Please don't paint Nvidia as a victim. They are not. All of these guys will have to support each other, for the foreseeable future, and for purely pragmatic reasons.Oxford Guy - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
They are not 'guys'. They're corporations. Corporations were invented to, to quote Ambrose Bierce, grant 'individual profit without individual responsibility'.mode_13h - Wednesday, March 17, 2021 - link
No disagreement, but I'm slightly disheartened you decided to take issue with my use of the term "guys". I'll try harder, next time--just for you.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
People humanize corporations all the time. It doesn't lead to good outcomes for societies.Of course, it's questionable whether corporations lead to good outcomes, considering that they're founded on scamming people (profit being 'sell less for more', needing tricks to get people to agree to that).
chavv - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Is it possible to add another "benchmark" - ESX server workload?Like, running 8-16-32-64 VMs all with some workload...
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
As we're rebuilding our server test suite, I'll be looking into more diverse benchmarks to include. It's a long process that needs a lot of thought and possibly resources so it's not always evident to achieve.eva02langley - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Just buy EPYC and start your hybridation and your reliance on a SINGLE supplier...eva02langley - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
edit: Just buy EPYC and start your hybridation and STOP your reliance on a SINGLE supplier...mode_13h - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
You guys should really include some workloads involving multiple <= 16-core/32-thread VMs, that could highlight the performance advantages of NPS4 mode. Even if all you did was partition up the system into smaller VMs running multithreaded SPEC 2017 tests, at least that would be *something*.That said, please don't get rid of all system-wide multithreaded tests, because we definitely still want to see how well these systems scale (both single- and multi- CPU).
ishould - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Yes this seems more useful for my needs as well. We use a grid system for job submission and not all cores will be hammered at the same time