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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psychobriggsy - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Indeed it is a ridiculous comment, and puts the earlier crying about the older Ubuntu and GCC into context - just an Intel Fanboy.In fact Intel's core architecture is older, and GCC has been tweaked a lot for it over the years - a slightly old GCC might not get the best out of Skylake, but it will get a lot. Zen is a new core, and GCC has only recently got optimisations for it.
EasyListening - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
I thought he was joking, but I didn't find it funny. So dumb.... makes me sad.blublub - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
I kinda miss Infinity Fabric on my Haswell CPU and it seems to only have on die - so why is that missing on Haswell wehen Ryzen is an exact copy?blublub - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Your actually sound similar to JuanRGA at SAKevin G - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
@CajunArson The cache hierarchy is radically different between these designs as well as the port arrangement for dispatch. Scheduling on Ryzen is split between execution resources where as Intel favors a unified approach.bill.rookard - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Well, that is something that could be figured out if they (anandtech) had more time with the servers. Remember, they only had a week with the AMD system, and much like many of the games and such, optimizing is a matter of run test, measure, examine results, tweak settings, rinse and repeat. Considering one of the tests took 4 hours to run, having only a week to do this testing means much of the optimization is probably left out.They went with a 'generic' set of relative optimizations in the interest of time, and these are the (very interesting) results.
CoachAub - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Benchmarks just need to be run on as level as a field as possible. Intel has controlled the market so long, software leans their way. Who was optimizing for Opteron chips in 2016-17? ;)theeldest - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
The compiler used isn't meant to be the the most optimized, but instead it's trying to be representative of actual customer workloads.Most customer applications in normal datacenters (not google, aws, azure, etc) are running binaries that are many years behind on optimizations.
So, yes, they can get better performance. But using those optimizations is not representative of the market they're trying to show numbers for.
CajunArson - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
That might make a tiny bit of sense if most of the benchmarks run were real-world workloads and not C-Ray or POV-Ray.The most real-world benchmark in the whole setup was the database benchmark.
coder543 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
The one benchmark that favors Intel is the "most real-world"? Absolutely, I want AnandTech to do further testing, but your comments do not sound unbiased.