AMD's Future in Servers: New 7000-Series CPUs Launched and EPYC Analysis
by Ian Cutress on June 20, 2017 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Enterprise CPUs
- EPYC
- Whitehaven
- 1P
- 2P
AMD’s Reach and Ecosystem
As mentioned at the top of the piece, the big launch for AMD this year is the server platform. EPYC has an opportunity to reinvigorate AMD’s bottom line to the tune of several billion dollars a year, if they can get traction in the market. Depending on which Analyst you speak to, some are predicting anywhere from a 5% to a 25% gain in market share for AMD, into a ~$25B total addressable market. Given AMD’s worth, that would mean that the balance sheet in a few years might look as if 80% of it is provided by the server team.
As part of the launch today, AMD is announcing partners working with them to optimize the platform for various workloads. Sources say that this includes all the major cloud providers, as well as all the major OEMs. We saw several demo systems at the launch event with partners as well, such as HPE and Dell.
Using SME/SVE with Samsung
The variety of internal systems used by AMD for the demonstrations (some Dell/HP logos)
Security Demonstration
Using 8 VMs to compile the Linux Kernel in one go on AMD vs Intel 2P systems
Of course, the big question is if AMD is actually getting in significant orders for processors. Nothing is public on that yet, and we are told that they are likely to be nearer the end of the year. We are eagerly waiting to test the processors when our review systems arrive, and we will provide our performance breakdown soon.
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Gothmoth - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
i read AMD reduced the benchmark numbers for intel by 46% because of compiler benefits for intel...can someone look at the fineprint and confirm or rebunk this???
spikebike - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
Well AMD is comparing a benchmark compiled with gcc-6.2 and running on Intel vs the same benchmark comiled with gcc-6.2 and running on AMD. For people who compile their own binaries with gcc this is quite fair. However intel's compiler is sometimes substantially faster than gcc, question is are the binaries you care about (Games? Handbrake? Something else?) compiled with intel's compiler or gcc?Gothmoth - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
you could be right but it reads on tomshardware as if they just take the numbers provided by intel and reduce them.. they actually don´t test on intel. the just take numbers from intel and reduce them by 46%.hamoboy - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
From what I read they tested the flagship Xeon, found the performance multiplier (~0.57), then extrapolated them across the rest of the range. So not completely scummy, but still cause to wait for actual benchmarks.TC2 - Wednesday, June 21, 2017 - link
according to the numbersE5-2698 v4 / EPYC 7551 ~~ 1.11
all this looks quite misleading! but this is amd :)
TC2 - Wednesday, June 21, 2017 - link
1.11 per core i mean to sayRyan Smith - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
We still need to independently confirm the multiplier, but yes, AMD is reducing Intel's official SPEC scores."Scores for these E5 processors extrapolated from test results published at www.spec.org, applying a conversion multiplier to each published score"
davegraham - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
Jeff @ Techreport has the multiplier officially listed.deltaFx2 - Wednesday, June 21, 2017 - link
Intel "cheats" in the icc compiler when compiling SPEC workloads. Libquantum is most notorious for such cheating but many others are also prone to this issue. In Libq, the icc compiler basically reorganize the datastructures and memory layout to get excellent vectorization, and I think 1/10th the bandwidth requirements as compared to gcc -O2. These transformations are there only for libquantum so it has little to no use for general workloads. Hence gcc (and llvm) reject such transformations. It's not unlike VW's emission defeat devices, actually.Go to Ars Technica. They have the full dump of slides. AMD does benchmark Xeon 1 or 2 systems themselves. However for some of the graphs where Xeon data is presented, they use Intel's published numbers (on icc of course), and derate it by this factor to account for this cheating. You could argue that AMD should have benched all the systems themselves and that's fair enough. But I don't think Tom's hardware is exactly qualified to know or state that the derate is 20% and not 40% or whatever. They benchmark consumer hardware, and wouldn't know a thing about this. So any number coming from these sources are dubious.
patrickjp93 - Wednesday, June 21, 2017 - link
Wrong. See the CPPCon 2015/2016 "Compiler Switches" talks. ICC does not CHEAT at all. It hasn't since 2014.Intel wins purely on merit.