Sizing Up Servers: Intel's Skylake-SP Xeon versus AMD's EPYC 7000 - The Server CPU Battle of the Decade?
by Johan De Gelas & Ian Cutress on July 11, 2017 12:15 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Intel
- Xeon
- Enterprise
- Skylake
- Zen
- Naples
- Skylake-SP
- EPYC
Memory Subsystem: Latency
The performance of modern CPUs depends heavily on the cache subsystem. And some applications depend heavily on the DRAM subsystem too. We used LMBench in an effort to try to measure cache and memory latency. The numbers we looked at were "Random load latency stride=16 Bytes".
| Mem Hierarchy |
AMD EPYC 7601 DDR4-2400 |
Intel Skylake-SP DDR4-2666 |
Intel Broadwell Xeon E5-2699v4 DDR4-2400 |
| L1 Cache cycles | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| L2 Cache cycles | 12 | 14-22 | 12-15 |
| L3 Cache 4-8 MB - cycles | 34-47 | 54-56 | 38-51 |
| 16-32 MB - ns | 89-95 ns | 25-27 ns (+/- 55 cycles?) |
27-42 ns (+/- 47 cycles) |
| Memory 384-512 MB - ns | 96-98 ns | 89-91 ns | 95 ns |
Previously, Ian has described the AMD Infinity Fabric that stitches the two CCXes together in one die and interconnects the 4 different "Zeppelin" dies in one MCM. The choice of using two CCXes in a single die is certainly not optimal for Naples. The local "inside the CCX" 8 MB L3-cache is accessed with very little latency. But once the core needs to access another L3-cache chunk – even on the same die – unloaded latency is pretty bad: it's only slightly better than the DRAM access latency. Accessing DRAM is on all modern CPUs a naturally high latency operation: signals have to travel from the memory controller over the memory bus, and the internal memory matrix of DDR4-2666 DRAM is only running at 333 MHz (hence the very high CAS latencies of DDR4). So it is surprising that accessing SRAM over an on-chip fabric requires so many cycles.
What does this mean to the end user? The 64 MB L3 on the spec sheet does not really exist. In fact even the 16 MB L3 on a single Zeppelin die consists of two 8 MB L3-caches. There is no cache that truly functions as single, unified L3-cache on the MCM; instead there are eight separate 8 MB L3-caches.
That will work out fine for applications that have a footprint that fits within a single 8 MB L3 slice, like virtual machines (JVM, Hypervisors based ones) and HPC/Big Data applications that work on separate chunks of data in parallel (for example, the "map" phase of "map/reduce"). However this kind of setup will definitely hurt the performance of applications that need "central" access to one big data pool, such as database applications and big data applications in the "Shuffle phase".
Memory Subsystem: TinyMemBench
To double check our latency measurements and get a deeper understanding of the respective architectures, we also use the open source TinyMemBench benchmark. The source was compiled for x86 with GCC 5.4 and the optimization level was set to "-O3". The measurement is described well by the manual of TinyMemBench:
Average time is measured for random memory accesses in the buffers of different sizes. The larger the buffer, the more significant the relative contributions of TLB, L1/L2 cache misses, and DRAM accesses become. All the numbers represent extra time, which needs to be added to L1 cache latency (4 cycles).
We tested with dual random read, as we wanted to see how the memory system coped with multiple read requests.
L3-cache sizes have increased steadily over the years. The Xeon E5 v1 had up to 20 MB, v3 came with 45 MB, and v4 "Broadwell EP" further increased this to 55 MB. But the fatter the cache, the higher the latency became. L3 latency doubled from Sandy Bridge-EP to Broadwell-EP. So it is no wonder that Skylake went for a larger L2-cache and a smaller but faster L3. The L2-cache offers 4 times lower latency at 512 KB.
AMD's unloaded latency is very competitive under 8 MB, and is a vast improvement over previous AMD server CPUs. Unfortunately, accessing more 8 MB incurs worse latency than a Broadwell core accessing DRAM. Due to the slow L3-cache access, AMD's DRAM access is also the slowest. The importance of unloaded DRAM latency should of course not be exaggerated: in most applications most of the loads are done in the caches. Still, it is bad news for applications with pointer chasing or other latency-sensitive operations.
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twtech - Thursday, July 20, 2017 - link
I'd really like to see some compile-time benchmarks for these CPUs.For my own particular interests, time taken to do a full recompile of the Unreal 4 engine from source would be very useful. But even something more generic like the Linux kernel compiles per hour benchmark could serve as a useful point of reference.
szupek - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
Meanwhile, the entire world still runs on IBM's DB2 for Datbases and IBM's Z/AS400 Mainframes. The fastest database in the world, by far...oh and the most secure (it's only hackable by standing in front of the console, seriously). Every single credit card transaction. Every single plain ticket. Most medical records and all of wall street. Yup. IBM still owns. So much that most of commenters probably have no idea just how big IBM truly is. If you care about Database speed & security, these processors shouldn't appeal to you.stevefan1999 - Saturday, July 22, 2017 - link
It's impossible for AMD to win completely.Remember kids, public cloud service providers such as Amazon(AWS), Google(GCP) and Joyent would still stick with Intel due to not only the compatibility issues like ecosystem and vendor inconsistency, but also the VM migration and security and module issues, all mentioned in the presentation slides presented by Intel. They are a very serious matter, as they, the public cloud services, are powering the Internet we use everyday, so being stable, consistent and be able to serve a good amount of SLA is vital to the public cloud, we wouldn't expect them to play with the new lad in the hood, the EPYC.
IIRC only the Microsoft(Azure) are using AMD server CPUs partially in some of their datacenters, running various Linux and Windows VMs using Hyper-V, and they have been performing quite well
The cloud services are exploding every year, but with what I've said, I doubt AMD could even kick in the first door at least for 3 to 4 years. This is still a big-win for Intel and what manipulations will Intel do I don't know.
On the other hand, Intel has failed to service the desktop market and they're figuring out how to hold their asses on the Internet infrastructure, never had them know the crusade of EPYC will come this fast.
The server market is quite a big meat, it's a 21 bil market, cool right? But that you will have guaranteed 'server upgrade' every year, is a bigger matter, as those server CPUs are designated to be disposed given the wattage and performance per dollar is lower on the newer CPUs. Those god-damn server operators will keen to replace their CPU (and therefore some serious metal pollution issues). Intel has been exploiting this and gained a big hurdle of money and therefore had their ecosystem grown. This is how Intel defends their platform by vendor lock-in, pathetic.
AMD is now being performance and cost competitive to Intel, but it's still dead in the High Performance Computing campaign unless AMD could provide higher frequencies. Well I have to say I know nothing about HPC, but I remembered the Bulldozer architecture of AMD is actually targeted and marketed for HPC! That's why AMD failed in general-purpose computing market and started the downfall of AMD/Domination of Intel 5 years ago. Even though we know the fate of Bulldozer, but hopefully AMD could still scrap some of the HPC goodies of Bulldozer out and benefits the mankind by accelerating researches such as finding the cures for cancer or solving some precise physics and mathematics.
Well, anyway the cloud, the HPC and the server market are the last resort for Intel and they will definitely hold their last ground. Good luck AMD on crushing the mean and obese Intel!
errorr - Sunday, July 23, 2017 - link
For all the talk about speed and efficiency the problem is about $$$. The sad fact is that what matters most isn't even the price of the cpus which is chump change in the grand scheme of things but how the software licensing costs are determined. Per core or per socket software pricing will matter a lot. The software companies will decide how successful EPYC is. I have a feeling they will be biased slightly toward AMD at the beginning as it is in their interest to foster competition for Intel, or if they are not forward looking enough the end customers might argue that the competition will benefit the SW companies in the long run by continuing to push competition.msroadkill612 - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Whatever, its all pointless if the competition can read your secrets, which is a matter very close to the hearts of the cheque signers.AMD seem to have something very superior to offer in that department.
qweqwe - Tuesday, August 8, 2017 - link
we just did some heavy inhouse hpc-tests with epyc against diff. intel servers.the epyc is the clear winner in terms of performance and power consumption when it
comes to hand-tuned parallel-vector-code examples.
not bad amd !
readonly1 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
qweqwe, I totally agree with you. Our inhouse HPC tests get the similar conclusion, after comparing AMD Epyc 7351 (dual socket, 32 cores, 2400Mhz) and Intel SKylake 6154 (dual socket, 36 cores, 3000Mhz). I think AMD clearly wins in the memory bandwidth, which is extremely important for HPC computation.msroadkill612 - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
7/11/2017 "Microsoft is already deploying AMD's EPYC in their Azure Cloud Datacenters."Interesting. As i have been theorising, a possible reason for the absence of retail epyc is not supply, but demand.
A single sale can soak up production runs.
If so tho, not much sign of big revenues from it yet, but there are other explanations for that. Contra processors for development work e.g.
q.epsilon.p - Sunday, June 10, 2018 - link
power consumption numbers with every benchmark would have been nice, because these parts are server benchmarks, Perf / Watt is one of the primary concerns. And where AMD kinda crush Intel, because it's isn't exactly being honest with it's TDP values nowadays when it comes to Data Centre and HEDT.TDP was traditionally the absolute maximum the CPU would put out as heat, now with a power consumption of 670W I am assuming that the heat being put out by the CPU is more than 165W.