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
SMT Integer Performance With SPEC CPU2006
Next, to test the performance impact of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) on a single core, we test with two threads on the same core. This way we can evaluate how well the core handles SMT.
| Subtest | Application type | Xeon E5-2690 @ 3.8 | Xeon E5-2690 v3 @ 3.5 | Xeon E5-2699 v4 @ 3.6 | EPYC 7601 @3.2 | Xeon 8176 @ 3.8 |
| 400.perlbench | Spam filter | 39.8 | 43.9 | 47.2 | 40.6 | 55.2 |
| 401.bzip2 | Compression | 32.6 | 32.3 | 32.8 | 33.9 | 34.8 |
| 403.gcc | Compiling | 40.7 | 43.8 | 32.5 | 41.6 | 32.1 |
| 429.mcf | Vehicle scheduling | 44.7 | 51.3 | 55.8 | 44.2 | 56.6 |
| 445.gobmk | Game AI | 36.6 | 35.9 | 38.1 | 36.4 | 39.4 |
| 456.hmmer | Protein seq. analyses | 32.5 | 34.1 | 40.9 | 34.9 | 44.3 |
| 458.sjeng | Chess | 36.4 | 36.9 | 39.5 | 36 | 41.9 |
| 462.libquantum | Quantum sim | 75 | 73.4 | 89 | 89.2 | 91.7 |
| 464.h264ref | Video encoding | 52.4 | 58.2 | 58.5 | 56.1 | 75.3 |
| 471.omnetpp | Network sim | 25.4 | 30.4 | 48.5 | 26.6 | 42.1 |
| 473.astar | Pathfinding | 31.4 | 33.6 | 36.6 | 29 | 37.5 |
| 483.xalancbmk | XML processing | 43.7 | 53.7 | 78.2 | 37.8 | 78 |
Now on a percentage basis versus the single-threaded results, so that we can see how much performance we gained from enabling SMT:
| Subtest | Application type | Xeon E5-2699 v4 @ 3.6 | EPYC 7601 @3.2 | Xeon 8176 @ 3.8 |
| 400.perlbench | Spam filter | 109% | 131% | 110% |
| 401.bzip2 | Compression | 137% | 141% | 128% |
| 403.gcc | Compiling | 137% | 119% | 131% |
| 429.mcf | Vehicle scheduling | 125% | 110% | 131% |
| 445.gobmk | Game AI | 125% | 150% | 127% |
| 456.hmmer | Protein seq. analyses | 127% | 125% | 125% |
| 458.sjeng | Chess | 120% | 151% | 125% |
| 462.libquantum | Quantum sim | 91% | 129% | 90% |
| 464.h264ref | Video encoding | 101% | 112% | 112% |
| 471.omnetpp | Network sim | 109% | 116% | 103% |
| 473.astar | Pathfinding | 140% | 149% | 137% |
| 483.xalancbmk | XML processing | 120% | 107% | 116% |
On average, both Xeons pick up about 20% due to SMT (Hyperthreading). The EPYC 7601 improved by even more: it gets a 28% boost on average. There are many possible explanations for this, but two are the most likely. In the situation where AMD's single threaded IPC is very low because it is waiting on the high latency of a further away L3-cache (>8 MB), a second thread makes sure that the CPU resources can be put to better use (like compression, the network sim). Secondly, we saw that AMD core is capable of extracting more memory bandwidth in lightly threaded scenarios. This might help in the benchmarks that stress the DRAM (like video encoding, quantum sim).
Nevertheless, kudos to the AMD engineers. Their first SMT implementation is very well done and offers a tangible throughput increase.
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msroadkill612 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
It looks interesting. Do u have a point?Are you saying they have a place in this epyc debate? using cheaper ddr3 ram on epyc?
yuhong - Friday, July 14, 2017 - link
"We were told from Intel that ‘only 0.5% of the market actually uses those quad ranked and LR DRAMs’, "intelemployee2012 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
what kind of a forum and website is this? we can't delete the account, cannot edit a comment for fixing typos, cannot edit username, cannot contact an admin if we need to report something. Will never use these websites from now on.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
"what kind of a forum and website is this?"The basic kind. It's not meant to be a replacement for forums, but rather a way to comment on the article. Deleting/editing comments is specifically not supported to prevent people from pulling Reddit-style shenanigans. The idea is that you post once, and you post something meaningful.
As for any other issues you may have, you are welcome to contact me directly.
Ranger1065 - Thursday, July 13, 2017 - link
That's a relief :)iwod - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
I cant believe what i just read. While I knew Zen was good for Desktop, i expected the battle to be in Intel's flavour on the Server since Intel has years to tune and work on those workload. But instead, we have a much CHEAPER AMD CPU that perform Better / Same or Slightly worst in several cases, using much LOWER Energy during workload, while using a not as advance 14nm node compared to Intel!And NO words on stability problems from running these test on AMD. This is like Athlon 64 all over again!
pSupaNova - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Yes it is.But this time much worse for Intel with their manufacturing lead shrinking along with their workforce.
Shankar1962 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Competition has spoiled the naming convention Intels 14 === competetions 7 or 10Intel publicly challenged everyone to revisit the metrics and no one responded
Can we discuss the yield density and scaling metrics? Intel used to maintain 2year lead now grew that to 3-4year lead
Because its vertically integrated company it looks like Intel vs rest of the world and yet their revenue profits grow year over year
iwod - Thursday, July 13, 2017 - link
Grew to 3 - 4 years? Intel is shipping 10nm early next year in some laptop segment, TSMC is shipping 7nm Apple SoC in 200M yearly unit quantity starting next September.If anything the gap from 2 - 3 years is now shrink to 1 to 1.5 year.
Shankar1962 - Thursday, July 13, 2017 - link
Yeah 1-1.5 years if we cheat the metrics when comparison2-3years if we look at metrics accurately
A process node shrink is compared by metrics like yield cost scaling density etc
7nm 10nm etc is just a name