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
Closing Thoughts
First of all, we have to emphasize that we were only able to spend about a week on the AMD server, and about two weeks on the Intel system. 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.
We can continue to talk about Intel's excellent mesh topology and AMD strong new Zen architecture, but at the end of the day, the "how" will not matter to infrastructure professionals. Depending on your situation, performance, performance-per-watt, and/or performance-per-dollar are what matters.
The current Intel pricing draws the first line. If performance-per-dollar matters to you, AMD's EPYC pricing is very competitive for a wide range of software applications. With the exception of database software and vectorizable HPC code, AMD's EPYC 7601 ($4200) offers slightly less or slightly better performance than Intel's Xeon 8176 ($8000+). However the real competitor is probably the Xeon 8160, which has 4 (-14%) fewer cores and slightly lower turbo clocks (-100 or -200 MHz). We expect that this CPU will likely offer 15% lower performance, and yet it still costs about $500 more ($4700) than the best EPYC. Of course, everything will depend on the final server system price, but it looks like AMD's new EPYC will put some serious performance-per-dollar pressure on the Intel line.
The Intel chip is indeed able to scale up in 8 sockets systems, but frankly that market is shrinking fast, and dual socket buyers could not care less.
Meanwhile, although we have yet to test it, AMD's single socket offering looks even more attractive. We estimate that a single EPYC 7551P would indeed outperform many of the dual Silver Xeon solutions. Overall the single-socket EPYC gives you about 8 cores more at similar clockspeeds than the 2P Intel, and AMD doesn't require explicit cross socket communication - the server board gets simpler and thus cheaper. For price conscious server buyers, this is an excellent option.
However, if your software is expensive, everything changes. In that case, you care less about the heavy price tags of the Platinum Xeons. For those scenarios, Intel's Skylake-EP Xeons deliver the highest single threaded performance (courtesy of the 3.8 GHz turbo clock), high throughput without much (hardware) tuning, and server managers get the reassurance of Intel's reliable track record. And if you use expensive HPC software, you will probably get the benefits of Intel's beefy AVX 2.0 and/or AVX-512 implementations.
The second consideration is the type of buyer. It is clear that you have to tune more and work harder to get the best performance out of AMD EPYC CPUs. In many ways it is basically a "virtual octal socket" solution. For enterprises with a small infrastructure crew and server hardware on premise, spending time on hardware tuning is not an option most of the time. For the cloud vendors, the knowledge will be available and tuning for EPYC will be a one-time investment. Microsoft is already deploying AMD's EPYC in their Azure Cloud Datacenters.
Looking Towards the Future
Looking towards the future, Intel has the better topology to add more cores in future CPU generations. However AMD's newest core is a formidable opponent. Scalar floating point operations are clearly faster on the AMD core, and integer performance is – at the same clock – on par with Intel's best. The dual CCX layout and quad die setup leave quite a bit of performance on the table, so it will be interesting how much AMD has learned from this when they launch the 7 nm "Rome" successor. Their SKU line-up is still very limited.
All in all, it must be said that AMD executed very well and delivered a new server CPU that can offer competitive performance for a lower price point in some key markets. Server customers with non-scalar sparse matrix HPC and Big Data applications should especially take notice.
As for Intel, the company has delivered a very attractive and well scaling product. But some of the technological advances in Skylake-SP are overshadowed by the heavy price tags and somewhat "over the top" market segmentation.
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sharath.naik - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel-xeon...Here is the link for you a single Xeon E5 v4 22 core does 5.3 (Dual at 5.9)jobs a day compared to dual Epyc 6.3. Ok they are 7% apart for dual socket but only 15% faster for dual epyc compared to single Xeon E5. Big Data does not do well in NUMA set up, same is the case with any regular large data applications. Try running EPYC without splitting spark into multiple processes, you will see how terrible a dual EPYC is going to be (the review mentions it but does not give a graph). Now this is terrible, to use EPYC first you need to change the way you build and run the applications and then expect 7-15% advantage vs a 2000$ CPU. It simple shows that EPYC is only use full for VMs and some synthetic tests. Any applications that deal with data can and should stay away from EPYC
warreo - Friday, July 14, 2017 - link
Why are you comparing Spark 1.5 benchmarks against 2.1.1? Johan pointed out in the article why they are not comparable and why he is using the new 2.1.1 benchmark.The exact Dual Xeon E5 2699 v4 you are referencing that did 5.9 jobs per day in Spark 1.5 only does 4.9 jobs per day on Spark 2.1.1. If we assume a similar % gap between dual and single as it was in Spark 1.5, then a single Xeon E5 2699 v4 would be capable of only 4.4 jobs per day in Spark 2.1.1, which is a 43% difference compared to dual Epycs.
Even leaving that aside, your exact arguments can be applied to the new Xeons as well, which are only 5% faster than the Epycs. Do you think the new Xeons suck as well?
Same thing for splitting Spark into multiple processes and needing to re-write applications -- you also run into the exact same issue with the new Xeons (which Johan also explictly points out).
Based on your arguments, I'm confused why you are taking aim only at Epyc and not the new Xeons. Please let me know if I'm missing something here.
AleXopf - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Username checks outdeltaFx2 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
"four 8core desktop dies" Oh, on the contrary. It's really a 4 die MCM server part, and each die is being sold as a desktop part. Nobody puts interconnect (fabric) on a desktop part. MCM is something intel has also done way back in the dual core era, and IBM continues to do. Don't float that canard re. desktop parts, it's just a design choice. AMD isn't trying to beat Intel in every market, just in some, and it does that. It might not win in HPC or big enterprise database (idk), but if you are a public cloud provider in the business of renting 4c8t or 8c16t VMs, AMD has a solid product. Now throw in the 128 PCIe lanes, which intel can't come close to. In fact, a 32c Naples in 1P is something that Intel has nothing to compete against for applications like storage, GPGPU, etc. The question isn't if it's good enough to run Intel out of business in the server space; that's not happening. It didn't when AMD had a superior product in Opteron. The question is, is it good enough for 5-10% market share in 2018-2019?"Intel cores are superior than AMD so a 28 core xeon is equal to ~40 cores if you compare again Ryzen core so this whole 28core vs 32core is a marketing trick". And yet all the numbers presented above point to the opposite. Ryzen != Epyc and i7700K != Syklake EP/SP, if that's where you're getting your numbers from. If not, present data.
Amiga500 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
No surprise that the Intel employee is descending to lies and deceit to try and plaster over the chasms! They've also reverted to bribing suppliers to offer Ryzen with only crippled memory speeds too (e.g. pcspecialist.co.uk - try and get a Ryzen system with >2133 MHz memory, yet the SKL-X has up top 3600 MHz memory --- the kicker is - they used to offer Ryzen at up to 3000 MHz memory!). It would seem old habits die hard.Hopefully the readers are wise enough to look at the performance data and make their decisions from that.
If OEMs are willing to bend to Intels dirty dollars, I trust customers will eventually choose to take their business elsewhere. We certainly won't be using pcspecialist again in the near future.
Shankar1962 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Look at the picture in this article and see what the big players reported when they upgraded to SkylakeDon't hate a company for the sake of argument. The world we live today from a hardware technology standpoint is because of Intel and respect it
https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/...
Shankar1962 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
I agree. Intel has been a data center leader and pioneered for decades now. It has proven track record and overall platform stability consistency and strong portfolio and roadmap. With intel transforming to a data company i see that the best is yet to come as it did smart acquisitions and I believe products with IP from those aquired companies are still nnot fully integrated. Everyone loves an underdog and its clear that everyones excited as someone is getting 5% share and Intel won't be sitting....they did it in the past they will do it again:)0ldman79 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
I find the power consumption info quite interesting, especially considering the TDP ratings for the processors.The platform makes a difference, though I wonder what the actual difference is. Intel and AMD have been rating their TDP differently for years now.
Atom11 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
After all these tests we still know nothing about AVX512. According to the specs, the floating point should be about 2x faster on CPU with AVX512 in compare to CPU without AVX512. There should be a clear line between Gcc and Icc. Gcc compiler does not support AVX512 anyway and it otherwise also has a relatively limited vectorization support. Not using Icc means, not using the only compiler which actually supports the Intel hardware features. But it yes, it is a difficult comparison, because you need both Instructions and Software which uses those instructions optimized the best way possible and some users simply don't bother about using optimized software. It would be nice to see comparison between: GCC+ AMD and ICC+Intel. So that only compiler is changed, but also the code is written so that it is possible for it to be efficiently vectorized and threaded. What can I get on Intel, if I use best possible software stack and what can I get on AMD? The current article only answers the question: What can i get on AMD and Intel if I dont bother with software stack and optimization.yuhong - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Inphi has a press release about shipping 1 million DDR3 LR-DIMM buffers six months before the launch of Haswell-E: https://www.inphi.com/media-center/press-room/pres... I wonder how many they shipped total so far (and also Montage).