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
Database Performance: MySQL Percona Server 5.7.0
For database benchmarking we still base our testing on Percona server 5.7, an enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL. But we have updated our SQL benchmarking once again. This time we use Sysbench 1.0.7, which is a lot more efficient than the previous 0.4 and 0.5 versions. As a result, the measured numbers are quite a bit higher, especially on the strongest systems. So you cannot compare this with any similar Sysbench-based benchmarking we have done before.
For our testing we used the read-only OLTP benchmark, which is slightly less realistic, but still much more interesting than most other Sysbench tests. This allows us to measure CPU performance without creating an I/O bottleneck.
As expected, the EPYC 7601 can not deliver high database performance out of the box. A small database that can be mostly cached in the L3-cache is the worst case scenario for EPYC. That said, there are quite a few tuning opportunities on EPYC. According to AMD, if you enable Memory Interleaving, performance should rise a bit (+10-15%?). Unfortunately, a few days before our deadline our connection to the BMC failed, so we could not try it out. In a later article, we will go deeper into specific tuning for both platforms and test additional database systems.
Nevertheless, our point stands: out of the box is the EPYC CPU a rather mediocre transactional database CPU. With good tuning it is possible EPYC may pass the Xeon v4, but the 8176 is by far the champion here. It will be interesting to measure how EPYC compares in the non-transactional databases (Document stores, Key-value...) but transactional databases will remain Intel territory for now.
Typically when high response times were reported, this indicated low single threaded performance. However for EPYC this is not the case. We tested with a database that is quite a bit larger than the 8 MB L3-cache, and the high response time is probably a result of the L3-cache latency.
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extide - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
PCPer made this same mistake -- Nehalem/Westmere used a crossbar memory bus -- not a ringbus. Only Nehalem/Westmere EX used the ringbus (the 6500/7500 series) The i7 and Xeon 5500 and 5600 series used the crossbar.extide - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Sandy Bridge brought the ringbus down to Xeon EP and client chips.Yorgos - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
"With the complexity of both server hardware and especially server software, that is very little time. There is still a lot to test and tune, but the general picture is clear."No wonder why we see ubuntu and ancient versions of gcc and the rest of the s/w stack.
Imagine if you tried to use debian or rhel, it would take you decades to get the review.
eligrey - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Why did you omit the Turbo frequencies for the Xeon Gold 6146 and 6144?Intel ARK says that the 6146's turbo frequency is 4.2GHz and the 6144's is 4.5GHz.
eligrey - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Oops, I mean 4.2GHz for both.boozed - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Need more Skylake-SP SKUsrHardware - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
For the purley system, It's listed that you used Chipset Intel Wellsburg B0This information cannot be correct. Lewisburg Chipset is the name of the purley chipset. Also, B0 stepping lewisburg also wouldn't boot with the stepping of CPU you have.
rHardware - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
That 0200011 microcode is also very old.Rickyxds - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
I'am a brazilian processors enthusiast and I'am very critic about intel and AMD processors, between 2012 and Q1 2017 AMD just doesn't existed, who bought AMD on that years, bougth just for love AMD and just it, doesn't for the price, doesn't for the high core count, doesn't for AMD is red, AMD was the worst performance processors. The A9 Apple dual core performance is better than FX 8150.But now I am very surprise with the aggressive AMD prices. No one here Imagined get the Ryzen 7 performance for less than $500. And I don't know if this scenario brings profit to AMD, but for the image against the intel it's wonderful.
On the next years we will see.
krumme - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Thank you for quality stuff article especially given the short time. So thank you for booting up Johan !Interesting and surpricing results.