AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review: A Peak vs Per Core Performance Balance
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Andrei Frumusanu on March 15, 2021 11:00 AM ESTDisclaimer June 25th: The benchmark figures in this review have been superseded by our second follow-up Milan review article, where we observe improved performance figures on a production platform compared to AMD’s reference system in this piece.
SPEC - Single-Threaded Performance
Single-thread performance of server CPUs usually isn’t the most important metric for most scale-out workloads, but there are use-cases such as EDA tools which are pretty much single-thread performance bound.
Power envelopes here usually don’t matter, and what is actually the performance factor that comes at play here is simply the boost clocks of the CPUs as well as the IPC improvement, and memory latency of the cores. We’re also testing the results here in NPS1 mode as if you have single-threaded bound workloads, you should prefer to use the systems in a single NUMA node mode.
Generationally, the new Zen3-based 7763 improves performance quite significantly over the 7742, even though I noted that both parts boosted almost equally to around 3400MHz in single-threaded scenarios. The uplifts here average over a geomean of +25%, with individual increases from +15 to +50%, with a median of +22%.
The Milan part also now more clearly competes against the best of the competition, even though it’s not a single-threaded optimised part as the 75F3 – we’ll see those scores a bit later.
In SPECfp, the Zen3 based Milan chip also does extremely well, measuring an average geomean boost of +14.2% and a median of +18%.
The new 7763 takes a notable lead in single-threaded performance amongst the large core count SKUs in the market right now. More notably, the 75F3 further increases this lead through the higher 4GHz boost clock this frequency optimised part enables.
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mode_13h - Saturday, March 20, 2021 - link
Okay, thanks for confirming with them.mode_13h - Saturday, March 20, 2021 - link
It's not the easiest thing to confirm with a test, since you'd have to come along behind the writer and observe that a write that SHOULD still be in cache isn't.CBeddoe - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
I'm excited by AMD's continuing design improvements.Can't wait to see what happens with the next node shrink. Intel has some catching up to do.
Ppietra - Tuesday, March 16, 2021 - link
Can someone please explain how is it possible that the power consumption of the all package is so much higher than the power consumption of the actual cores doing the work?Spunjji - Friday, March 19, 2021 - link
Because the I/O die is running on an older 14nm process and is servicing all of the cores. In a 64-core CPU, the per-core power use of the I/O die is less than 2W. Still too much, of course, but in context not as obscene as it looks when you look at the total power.Elstar - Tuesday, March 16, 2021 - link
Lest it go unsaid, I really appreciate the "compile a big C++ project" benchmark (i.e. LLVM). Thank you!Spunjji - Tuesday, March 16, 2021 - link
"To that end, all we have to compare Milan to is Intel’s Cascade Lake Xeon Scalable platform, which was the same platform we compared Rome to."Says it all, really. Good work AMD, and cheers to the team for the review!
Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, March 16, 2021 - link
Sysadmin: Ram? Rome?AMD: Milan, darling, Milan...
Ivan Argentinski - Tuesday, March 16, 2021 - link
Congrats for going more in-depth for the per-core performance! For many enterprise buyers, this is the most (only?) important metric. I do suspect, that in this regard, the 8 core 72F3 will actually be the best 3rd gen EPYC!But to better understand this, we need more test and per-core comparisons. I would suggest comparing:
* All current AMD fast/frequency optimized CPUs - EPYC 72F3, 73F3, ...
* Previous gen AMD fast/frequency CPUs like EPYC 7F32, ...
* Intel Frequency optimized CPUs like Xeon Gold 6250, 6244, ...
The only metric that matters is per-core performance under full *sustained* load.
Exploring the dynamic TDP of AMD EPYC 3rd gen is also an interesting option. For example, I am quite curious about configuring 72F3 with 200W instead of the default 180W.
Andrei Frumusanu - Saturday, March 20, 2021 - link
If we get more SKUs to test, I'll be sure to do so.