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
Intel Expanding the Chipset: 10 Gigabit Ethernet and QuickAssist Technology
The refresh strategy from Intel on the chipset side has an ultra-long cadence. In recent memory, Intel’s platform launches are designed to support two generations of processor release, and in that time there is typically no chipset update, leaving the platform controller hub semi-static for functionality for usually three years. This is compared to the consumer side, where new chipsets are launched with every new CPU generation, with bigger jumps coming every couple of years. For the new launch today, Intel pushing the enterprise chipset ahead in a new direction.
The point of the chipset previously was to provide some basic IO support in the form of SATA/SAS ports, some USB ports, and a few PCIe lanes for simple controllers like USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, or perhaps an x4 PCIe slot for a non-accelerator type card. The new chipsets, part of the C620 family codenamed Lewisburg, are designed to assist with networking, cryptography, and act more like a PCIe switch with up to 20 PCIe 3.0 lane support.
The headline features that matter most is the upgrade in DMI connection to the chipset, upgraded from DMI 2.0 to DMI 3.0 to match the consumer platforms, having those 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes from the chipset, and also the new feature under CPU Uplink.
For the new generation of Lewisburg chipsets, if an OEM requires that a platform has access to a cryptography engine or 10 Gigabit Ethernet, then they can attach 8 or 16 lanes from the processor into the chipset via this CPU Uplink port. Depending on which model of chipset is being used, this can provide up to four 10 GbE ports with iWARP RDMA, or up to 100 GB/s IPSec/SSL of QuickAssist support.
Intel will offer seven different versions of the chipset, varying in 10G and QAT support, but also varying in TDP:
On the cryptography side, Intel has previously sold add-in PCIe cards for QuickAssist, but is now moving it onto the systems directly. By adding it into the chipset, it can be paired with the Ethernet traffic and done in-situ, and specifically Intel points to bulk cryptography (150 Gb/s AES256/SHA256), Public Key Encryption (100k ops of RSA2048) and compression (100+ Gb/s deflate).
With the GbE, Intel has designed this to be paired with the X722 PHY, and supports network virtualization, traffic shaping, and supports Intel’s Data Plane Development Kit for advanced packet forwarding.
The chipset will also include a new feature called Intel’s Innovation Engine, giving a small embedded core into the PCH which mirrors Intel’s Management Engine but is designed for system-builders and integrators. This allows specialist firmware to manage some of the capabilities of the system on top of Intel’s ME, and is essentially an Intel Quark x86 core with 1.4MB SRAM.
The chipsets are also designed to be supported between different CPUs within the same multi-processor system, or for a system to support multiple chipsets at once as needed.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
219 Comments
View All Comments
ddriver - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Gotta love the "you don't care about the xeon prices" part thou. Now that intel don't have a performance advantage, and their product value at the high end is half that of amd, AT plays the "intel is the better brand" card. So expected...OZRN - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
You need some perspective. Database licensing for Oracle happens per core, where Intel's performance is frequently better in a straight line and since they achieve it on lower core count it's actually better value for the use case. Higher per-CPU cost is not so much of a concern when you pay twice as much for a processor license to cover those cores.I'm an AMD fan and I made this account just for you, sweetheart, but don't blind yourself to the truth just because Intel has a history of shady business. In most regards this is a balanced review, and where it isn't, they tell you why it might not be. Chill out.
ddriver - Thursday, July 13, 2017 - link
You are such a clown. Nobody, I repeat, NOBODY on this planet uses 64 core 128 thread 512 gigabytes of ram servers to run a few MB worth of database. You telling me to get pespective thus can mean only two things, that you are a buthurt intel fanboy troll or that you are in serious need of head examination. Or maybe even both. At any rate, that perfectly explains your ridiculously low standards for "balanced review".Notmyusualid - Friday, July 14, 2017 - link
It seems no matter what opinion someone presents that might exhibit Intel in a better light - you are going to hate it anyway.What a life you must lead.
OZRN - Friday, July 14, 2017 - link
No, they don't. They use them to host gigabytes to terabytes worth of mission critical databases, with specified amounts of cores dedicated to seperate environments of hard partitioned data manipulation. I've done some quick math for you and in an average setup of Enterprise Edition of Oracle DB, with only the usually reported options and extras, this type of database would cost over $3.7m to run on *64 cores alone*. At this point, where is your hardware sunk costs argument?Also, I don't think anyone here is impressed by your ability to immediately personally insult people making valid points. Good luck finding your head that deep in your colon.
CajunArson - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
"All of our testing was conducted on Ubuntu Server "Xenial" 16.04.2 LTS (Linux kernel 4.4.0 64 bit). The compiler that ships with this distribution is GCC 5.4.0."I'd recommend using a more updated distro and especially a more up to date compiler (GCC 5.4 is only a bug-fix release of a compiler from *2015*) if you want to see what these parts are truly capable of.
Phoronix does heavy-duty Linux reviews and got some major performance boosts on the i9 7900X simply by using up to date distros: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&...
Considering that Purley is just an upscaled version of the i9 7900X, I wouldn't be surprised to see different results.
CajunArson - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
As a followup to my earlier comment, that Phoronix story, for example, shows a speedup factor of almost 5X on the C-ray benchmark simply by using a modern distro with some tuning for the more modern Skylake architecture.I'm not saying Purley would have a 5X speedup on C-ray per-say, but I'd be shocked if it didn't get a good boost using modern software that's actually designed for the Skylake architecture.
CoachAub - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Keywords: "actually designed for the Skylake architecture". Will there be optimizations for AMD Epyc chips?mkozakewich - Friday, July 14, 2017 - link
If it's a reasonable optimization, it makes sense to include it in the benchmark. If I were building these systems, I'd want to see benchmarks that resembled as closely as possible my company's workflow. (Which may be for older software or newer software; neither are inherently more relevant, though benchmarks on newer software will usually be relevant further into the future.)CajunArson - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
And another followup: The time kernel compilation on the i9 7900X got almost a factor of 2 speedup over the Ubuntu 16.04 using more modern distros.