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
Energy Consumption
We tested the energy consumption of our servers for a one-minute period in several scenario. The first scenario is the point where the server under testing performs best in MySQL: the highest throughput just before the response time goes up significantly.
To test the power usage of the FPU, we measure the power consumption when POV-Ray was using all available threads.
| SKU | TDP (on paper) spec |
Idle Server W |
MySQL Best Throughput at Lowest Resp. Time (*) (W) |
POV-Ray 100% CPU load |
| Dual Xeon E5-2699 v4 | 2x145 W | 106 | 412 | 425 |
| Dual Xeon 8176 | 2x165W | 190 | 300 | 453 |
| Dual EPYC 7601 | 2x180W | 151 | 321 | 327 |
Both the Xeon 8176 and Dual EPYC server had a few more additional components (a separate 10 GBe card for example) than the Dual Xeon E5-2699v4 system, but that does not fully explain why idle power is so much higher, especially on the Dual Xeon 8176. We lacked the time to fully investigate this, and the last two systems have relatively new firmware.
The only conclusion that we can draw so far, is that the EPYC 7601 is likely to draw more power when running integer applications, while the rather wide FP units of the Intel CPUs are real power hogs even if they do not run heavy AVX applications. To be continued...
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Kaotika - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11464/intel-announce...This one remains wrong though
Ian Cutress - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Always reference the newest piece, especially the main review.Or we'd spend half of our time going back and updating old pieces and reviews with new data.
scottb9239 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
On the POV-RAY benchmark, shouldn't that read as almost 16% faster than the dual 2699 v4 and 32% faster than the dual 8176?scienceomatica - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
I think that a fair game would be to compare the top offer of one and the other manufacturer, in other words, the Xeon 8180 should be included in the benchmark regardless of the aspect of the price. Then the difference would be quite in favor of the Intel processor, although it has few cores less.Tamz_msc - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Will we get to see more FP HPC-oriented workloads like SPECfp2006 or even 2017 being discussed in a future article?lefty2 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
I can summarize this article: "$8719 chip beaten by $4200 chip in everything except database and Appache spark."Well done Intel, another Walletripper!
Shankar1962 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Then why did google att aws etc upgraded to skylake. They could have saved billions of dollars.Shankar1962 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Look at what big players upgrading to skylake reportedThese are real workloads
No one cares about labs
These numbers decide who wins and who loses
No wonder AMD sells at $4200
https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/...
nitrobg - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Pricing on page 10 should reflect that the 2P EPYC prices are for 2 processors, not per CPU. The price of Xeons is per CPU.coder543 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
That doesn't seem true. The prices they currently have seem to be correct. Got a source?