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
Energy Consumption
We tested the energy consumption of our servers for a one-minute period in several scenario. The first scenario is the point where the server under testing performs best in MySQL: the highest throughput just before the response time goes up significantly.
To test the power usage of the FPU, we measure the power consumption when POV-Ray was using all available threads.
| SKU | TDP (on paper) spec |
Idle Server W |
MySQL Best Throughput at Lowest Resp. Time (*) (W) |
POV-Ray 100% CPU load |
| Dual Xeon E5-2699 v4 | 2x145 W | 106 | 412 | 425 |
| Dual Xeon 8176 | 2x165W | 190 | 300 | 453 |
| Dual EPYC 7601 | 2x180W | 151 | 321 | 327 |
Both the Xeon 8176 and Dual EPYC server had a few more additional components (a separate 10 GBe card for example) than the Dual Xeon E5-2699v4 system, but that does not fully explain why idle power is so much higher, especially on the Dual Xeon 8176. We lacked the time to fully investigate this, and the last two systems have relatively new firmware.
The only conclusion that we can draw so far, is that the EPYC 7601 is likely to draw more power when running integer applications, while the rather wide FP units of the Intel CPUs are real power hogs even if they do not run heavy AVX applications. To be continued...
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.