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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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