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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Panxa - Sunday, July 16, 2017 - link
"Competition has spoiled the naming convention Intels 14 === competetions 7 or 10"The node naming convention used to be the gate length, however that has become irrelevant. Intel 14 nm gate lenghth is about 1.5x and 10 nm about 1.8x. Companies and organizations have developed quite accurate models to asses process density with equations based on process poarameters like CPP and MPP to what they call a "standard node"
"Intel used to maintain 2 year lead now grew that to 3-4year lead"
Don't belive intel propaganda. Intel takes the lead in 2014 with their 14nm process with a standard node value of 12.1. Samsung and then TSMC take the lead in 2017 with their 10nm processes having standard node values of 11.2 and 10.3 respectively. Intel will retake the the lead back when they deliver their 10nm process with a standard node value of 8.3. However it will be a short lived lead, TSMC will retake the lead back with their 7nm with a standard node of 7.9 before GLOBALFOUNDRIES takes the lead in 2018 with their 7nm process with a standard node value of 7.8. The gap is gone !!!
"yet their revenue profits grow year over year"
Wrong. Intel revenue for the last years remained fairly constant
2011 grow
2012 decline
2013 decline
2014 grow
2015 decline
2016 grow
All in all from 2011 to 2016 revenue went from 54 billion to 59 billion. If we take into account inflation $54 billion in the year 2011 is worth $58.70 billion today.
Not to mention that Samsung has overtaken Intel to become the world No.1 semiconductor company, and that a "pure play" foundry like TSMC has surpassed intel in market CAP
johnp_ - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
The Xeon Bronze Table on Page 7 seems to have an error. It lists the 4112 as having 5.50MB L3, but ark says it has 8.25MB, just like the 3104, so it looks like it has an above-average L3/Core:https://ark.intel.com/products/123551
Ian Cutress - Friday, July 14, 2017 - link
I've got Intel documents from our briefings that say it has the regular 1.375MB/core allocation, and others saying it has 8.25MB. I'm double checking.johnp_ - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
All commercial listings and most reviews I've seen online show the processor with 8.25MB as well.Do you have any further information from Intel?
pepoluan - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
What I'm dying to know: Performance when running as virtualization host. Using Xen, VMware, and Hyper-V.Threska - Saturday, July 22, 2017 - link
Virtualization itself, and more importantly virtualization security.Sparkyman215 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Typo here: Intel will seven different versions of the chipset, varying in 10G and QAT support, but also varying in TDP:tmbm50 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
One thing to consider when considering value is the Microsoft Server 2016 core tax.....assuming your mission critical apps are still tied to MS ;-)Server 2016 now chargers per core with an 8 core socket as the base. The Window license for a 32 core server is NUTS.
I'm surprised AMD and Intel are not pushing Microsoft on this. For datacenters like ourselves its pushing us to 8 core sku's with more 2U nodes.
msroadkill612 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Aye, its a fuuny world lad.The way the automobile panned out differently in different countries, was laargely die to fuel tax regimes, rather than technology.
i.e. what is the best way to cheat a bit on the incumbent tax rules of germany/france/uk vs a more laissez faire USA. In UK, u were taxed on horsepower, but u could cheat a bit w/ hi revs & more gears - that sort of thing.
rahvin - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Who runs any Windows service on bare metal these days? If you haven't virtulalized your windows servers running on KVM you should.