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
Memory Subsystem: Latency
The performance of modern CPUs depends heavily on the cache subsystem. And some applications depend heavily on the DRAM subsystem too. We used LMBench in an effort to try to measure cache and memory latency. The numbers we looked at were "Random load latency stride=16 Bytes".
| Mem Hierarchy |
AMD EPYC 7601 DDR4-2400 |
Intel Skylake-SP DDR4-2666 |
Intel Broadwell Xeon E5-2699v4 DDR4-2400 |
| L1 Cache cycles | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| L2 Cache cycles | 12 | 14-22 | 12-15 |
| L3 Cache 4-8 MB - cycles | 34-47 | 54-56 | 38-51 |
| 16-32 MB - ns | 89-95 ns | 25-27 ns (+/- 55 cycles?) |
27-42 ns (+/- 47 cycles) |
| Memory 384-512 MB - ns | 96-98 ns | 89-91 ns | 95 ns |
Previously, Ian has described the AMD Infinity Fabric that stitches the two CCXes together in one die and interconnects the 4 different "Zeppelin" dies in one MCM. The choice of using two CCXes in a single die is certainly not optimal for Naples. The local "inside the CCX" 8 MB L3-cache is accessed with very little latency. But once the core needs to access another L3-cache chunk – even on the same die – unloaded latency is pretty bad: it's only slightly better than the DRAM access latency. Accessing DRAM is on all modern CPUs a naturally high latency operation: signals have to travel from the memory controller over the memory bus, and the internal memory matrix of DDR4-2666 DRAM is only running at 333 MHz (hence the very high CAS latencies of DDR4). So it is surprising that accessing SRAM over an on-chip fabric requires so many cycles.
What does this mean to the end user? The 64 MB L3 on the spec sheet does not really exist. In fact even the 16 MB L3 on a single Zeppelin die consists of two 8 MB L3-caches. There is no cache that truly functions as single, unified L3-cache on the MCM; instead there are eight separate 8 MB L3-caches.
That will work out fine for applications that have a footprint that fits within a single 8 MB L3 slice, like virtual machines (JVM, Hypervisors based ones) and HPC/Big Data applications that work on separate chunks of data in parallel (for example, the "map" phase of "map/reduce"). However this kind of setup will definitely hurt the performance of applications that need "central" access to one big data pool, such as database applications and big data applications in the "Shuffle phase".
Memory Subsystem: TinyMemBench
To double check our latency measurements and get a deeper understanding of the respective architectures, we also use the open source TinyMemBench benchmark. The source was compiled for x86 with GCC 5.4 and the optimization level was set to "-O3". The measurement is described well by the manual of TinyMemBench:
Average time is measured for random memory accesses in the buffers of different sizes. The larger the buffer, the more significant the relative contributions of TLB, L1/L2 cache misses, and DRAM accesses become. All the numbers represent extra time, which needs to be added to L1 cache latency (4 cycles).
We tested with dual random read, as we wanted to see how the memory system coped with multiple read requests.
L3-cache sizes have increased steadily over the years. The Xeon E5 v1 had up to 20 MB, v3 came with 45 MB, and v4 "Broadwell EP" further increased this to 55 MB. But the fatter the cache, the higher the latency became. L3 latency doubled from Sandy Bridge-EP to Broadwell-EP. So it is no wonder that Skylake went for a larger L2-cache and a smaller but faster L3. The L2-cache offers 4 times lower latency at 512 KB.
AMD's unloaded latency is very competitive under 8 MB, and is a vast improvement over previous AMD server CPUs. Unfortunately, accessing more 8 MB incurs worse latency than a Broadwell core accessing DRAM. Due to the slow L3-cache access, AMD's DRAM access is also the slowest. The importance of unloaded DRAM latency should of course not be exaggerated: in most applications most of the loads are done in the caches. Still, it is bad news for applications with pointer chasing or other latency-sensitive operations.
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tamalero - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
How is that different if AMD ran stuff that is extremely optimized for them?Friendly0Fire - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
That's kinda the point? You want to benchmark the CPUs in optimal scenarios, since that's what you'd be looking at in practice. If one CPU's weakness is eliminated by using a more recent/tweaked compiler, then it's not a weakness.coder543 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Rather, you want to test under practical scenarios. Very few people are going to be running 17.04 on production grade servers, they will run an LTS release, which in this case is 16.04.It would be good to have benchmarks from 17.04 as another point of comparison, but given how many things they didn't have time to do just using 16.04, I can understand why they didn't use 17.04.
Santoval - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
A compromise can be found by upgrading Ubuntu 16.04's outdated kernel. Ubuntu LTS releases include support for rolling HWE Stacks, which is a simple meta package for installing newer kernels compiled, modified, tested and packaged by the Ubuntu Kernel Team, and installed directly from the official Ubuntu repositories (not via a Launchpad PPA). With HWE 16.04 LTS can install up to the kernel of 18.04 LTS.I also use 16.04 LTS + HWE (it just requires installing the linux-generic-hwe-16.04 package), which currently provides the 4.8 kernel. There is even a "beta" version of HWE (the same package plus an -edge at the end) for installing the 4.10 kernel (aka the kernel of 17.04) earlier, which will normally be released next month.
I just spotted various 4.10 kernel listings after checking in Synaptic, so they must have been added very recently. After that there are two more scheduled kernel upgrades, as is shown in the following link. Of course HWE upgrades solely the kernel, it does not upgrade any application or any of the user level parts to a more recent version of Ubuntu.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/RollingLTSEnablemen...
CajunArson - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Considering the similarities between RyZen and Haswell (that aren't coincidental at all) you are already seeing a highly optimized set of RyZen results.But I have no problem seeing RyZen be tested with the newest distros, the only difference being that even Ubuntu 16.04 already has most of the optimizations for RyZen baked in.
coder543 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
What similarities? They're extremely different architectures. I can't think of any obvious similarities. Between the CCX model, caches being totally different layouts, the infinity fabric, Intel having better AVX-256/512 stuff (IIRC), etc.I don't think 16.04 is naturally any more optimized for Ryzen than it is for Skylake-SP.
CajunArson - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Oh please, at the core level RyZen is a blatant copy-n-paste of Haswell with the only exception being they just omitted half the AVX hardware to make their lives easier.It's so obvious that if you followed any of the developer threads for people optimizing for RyZen they say to just use the Haswell compiler optimizations that actually work better than the official RyZen optimization flags.
ddriver - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Can't tell if this post is funny or sad.CajunArson - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
It's neither: It's accurate.Don't believe me? Look at the differences in performance of the holy 1800X over multiple Linux distros ranging from pretty new (OpenSuse Tumbleweed) to pretty old (Fedora 23 from 2015): http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&...
Nowhere near the variation that we see with Skylake X since Haswell was already a solved problem long before RyZen lauched.
coder543 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Right, of course. Ryzen is a copy-and-paste of Haswell.Don't make me laugh.