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
Java Performance
The SPECjbb 2015 benchmark has "a usage model based on a world-wide supermarket company with an IT infrastructure that handles a mix of point-of-sale requests, online purchases, and data-mining operations." It uses the latest Java 7 features and makes use of XML, compressed communication, and messaging with security.
We tested SPECjbb with four groups of transaction injectors and backends. The reason why we use the "Multi JVM" test is that it is more realistic: multiple VMs on a server is a very common practice.
The Java version was OpenJDK 1.8.0_131. We applied relatively basic tuning to mimic real-world use, while aiming to fit everything inside a server with 128 GB of RAM:
The graph below shows the maximum throughput numbers for our MultiJVM SPECJbb test.
Even though our testing is not the ideal case for AMD (you would probably choose 8 or even 16 back-ends), the EPYC edges out the Xeon 8176. Using 8 JVMs increases the gap from 1% to 4-5%.
The Critical-jOPS metric is a throughput metric under response time constraint.
With this number of threads active, you can get much higher Critical-jOps by significantly increasing the RAM per JVM. However, we did not want that as this would mean we can not compare with systems that can only accommodate 128 GB of RAM.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
219 Comments
View All Comments
Shankar1962 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
AMD is fooling everyone one by showing more cores, pci lanes, security etcCan someone explain me why GOOGLE ATT AWS ALIBABA etc upgraded to sky lake when AMD IS SUPERIOR FOR HALF THE PRICE?
Shankar1962 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Sorry its BaiduPretty sure Alibaba will upgrade
https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/...
PixyMisa - Thursday, July 13, 2017 - link
Lots of reasons.1. Epyc is brand new. You can bet that every major server customer has it in testing, but it could easily be a year before they're ready to deploy.
2. Functions like ESXi hot migration may not be supported on Epyc yet, and certainly not between Epyc and Intel.
3. Those companies don't pay the same prices we do. Amazon have customised CPUs for AWS - not a different die, but a particular spec that isn't on Intel's product list.
There's no trick here. This is what AMD did before, back in 2006.
blublub - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
I kinda miss Infinity Fabric on my Haswell CPU and it seems to only have on die - so why is that missing on Haswell wehen Ryzen is an exact copy?blublub - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
argh that post did get lost.zappor - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
4.4.0 kernel?! That's not good for single-die Zen and must be even worse for Epyc!AMD's Ryzen Will Really Like A Newer Linux Kernel:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&a...
Kernel 4.10 gives Linux support for AMD Ryzen multithreading:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3176323/linux/kerne...
JohanAnandtech - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
We will update to a more updated kernel once the hardware update for 16.04 LTS is available. Should be August according to Ubuntukwalker - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
You mention an OpenFOAM benchmark when talking about the new mesh topology but it wasn't included in the article. Any way you could post that? We are trying to evaluate EPYC vs Skylake for CFD applications.JohanAnandtech - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
Any suggestion on a good OpenFoam benchmark that is available? Our realworld example is not compatible with the latest OpenFoam versions. Just send me an e-mail, if you can assist.Lolimaster - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
AMD's lego design where basically every CCX can be used in whatever config they want be either consumer/HEDT or server is superior in the multicore era.Cheaper to produce, cheaper to sell, huge profits.