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.
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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.