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& Andrei Frumusanu on March 15, 2021 11:00 AM ESTDisclaimer June 25th: The benchmark figures in this review have been superseded by our second follow-up Milan review article, where we observe improved performance figures on a production platform compared to AMD’s reference system in this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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nonoverclock - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
When do we think this will be available to order? Also wondering the same about Ice Lake SP availability but seems it's hard to know for sure.SarahKerrigan - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Looks decent, though the price and TDP increases make it look less appealing at the high end than it otherwise would. Perks of reusing the same process for two generations, I suppose.Going to be a very interesting compare against Altra Max.
plb4333 - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
wouldn't even have to be compared to the 'max' necessarily. Altra without the max is still a contender.Wilco1 - Sunday, March 21, 2021 - link
Absolutely, Milan and Altra are almost exactly as fast on SPECINT (Altra wins 1S, Milan wins 2S, both by ~1%). Altra Max will give a clear answer as to whether it is better to have 128 threads or 128 cores.ECC_or_GTFO - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Why won't AMD let us secure boot their CPUs? There is simply no valid argument except hiding backdoors at this point.JfromImaginstuff - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Well most Linux distros do not do well with secure boot and that is what is running on most severe these daysJfromImaginstuff - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
*servers these daysBob Todd - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
All the enterprise distros support secure boot so that isn’t really a factor (RHEL, SEL, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.). It doesn’t matter that random pet projects with 1 or 2 contributors don’t support it in this context.Oxford Guy - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
I assume EPYC contains AMD's extra black box CPU. Can those with large-enough wallets get that functionality excised, as China reportedly did for the Zen 1 tech deal?mode_13h - Wednesday, March 17, 2021 - link
It's supposedly ARM TrustZone, right?