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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CajunArson - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Would a high-end server that was built in 2014 necessarily update? Maybe not.Should a high-end server with a brand new microarchitecture use the most recent version of the software if it has any expectation of seeing a real benefit? Absolutely.
If this was a GPU review and Anandtech used 2 year old drivers on a new GPU (assuming they even worked at all) we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Home users playing video games are in a different environment than you find in a business datacenter. There's a lot less money to be lost when a driver update causes a performance regression or eliminates a feature. Conversely, needlessly updating software in the aforementioned datacenter can result in the loss of many millions if something goes wrong.wallysb01 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Conversely, having stuff working, but unnecessarily slowly costs money as well. Its a balance, and if you're spending hundreds of thousands or even millions on a cluster/data center/what have you, you'd probably want to spend at least a little bit of time optimizing it, right?Icehawk - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Most of the businesses I have worked for, ranging from 10 people to 50k, use severely outdated software and the barest minimum of patching. Optimization? HA!For example I work for a manufacturer & retailer currently, our POS system was last patched in 2012 by the vendor and has been replaced by at least two versions newer. We have XP machines in each of our stores as that is the only OS that can run the software.
The above is very typical. The 50k company I worked for had software so old and deeply entrenched that modernizing it is virtually impossible. My current company is working on getting to a new product... that was new in 2012 and has also been replaced with a newer version. Whee!
Icehawk - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
One other thing - maybe the big shops actually do test/size but none of the places I have worked at and have been involved in do any testing, benchmarking, etc. They just buy whatever their preferred vendor gives them that meets the budget and they *think* will work. My coworker is in charge (lol) of selecting servers for a new office... he has no clue what anything in this article is. He has never read a single review, overview, or test of a processor. I could keep going on like this :(0ldman79 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Icehawk's comments are so accurate it is scary.I can't tell you how many businesses running custom *nix software running in a VM on a Windows server.
They're not all about speed. Reliability is the single most important factor, speed is somewhere down the line. The people that make those decisions and the people that drink coffee while they're waiting on the machines are very different.
Neither understand that it could all be done so much better and almost all of them are utterly terrified at the concept of speeding up the process if it means *any* changes are made.
JohanAnandtech - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
We did test with NAMD 2.12 (Dec 2016).sutamatamasu - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Glad, AMD make back again to this segment, now we can only see what can Raja to do for server market with Radeon instinct.Kaotika - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
So this confirms that the previous information regarding Skylake-X core configurations was wrong, and 12-core variant is in fact using HCC-core instead of LCC-core?Ian Cutress - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
We corrected that in our Skylake-X review.