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& Andrei Frumusanu on March 15, 2021 11:00 AM ESTDisclaimer June 25th: The benchmark figures in this review have been superseded by our second follow-up Milan review article, where we observe improved performance figures on a production platform compared to AMD’s reference system in this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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Oxford Guy - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
PSP, as far as I know.Linustechtips12#6900xt - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
I understand that "zen" architecture is for x86 but with modifications could it be transplanted to the ARM instruction set, as i see it, it definitely could so the real question is when will the transition really start i think around the theoretical zen 5th gen or 6th gen, theres gonna be a lot of arm around here especially with apple. and yes it will defenitly start wiht servers it always does.Gomez Addams - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
There are really two things at work : the instruction set of the processor and its topology. AMD has been improving both quite a bit. The instruction set enhancements won't transfer quite so well to ARM but the topology certainly can. Since ARM processors are much smaller, they could probably work in chiplets with possibly 32 cores in each or maybe 16 cores and 4-way SMT. That could make for a very impressive server processor. Four chiplets would give 64 cores and 256 threads. Yikes!rahvin - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
So much wrong.mode_13h - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
There are pieces of it that can be reused (on the same manufacturing node, at least), but making a truly-competitive ARM chip is probably going to involve some serious tinkering with the pipeline stages & architecture. And there are significant parts of an x86 chip that you'd have to throw out and redo, most notably the instruction decoder.In all, it's a different core that you're talking about. Not like CPU vs. GPU level of difference, but it's a lot more than just cosmetics.
coder543 - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
"For this launch, both the 16-core F and 24-core F have the same TDP, so the only reason I can think of for AMD to have a higher price on the 16-core processor is that it only has 2 cores per chiplet active, rather than three? Perhaps it is easier to bin a processor with an even number of cores active."If I were to speculate, I would strongly guess that the actual reason is licensing. AMD knows that more people are going to want the 16 core CPUs in order to fit into certain brackets of software licensing, so AMD charges more for those to maximize profit and availability of the 16 core parts. For those customers, moving to a 24 core processor would probably mean paying *significantly* more for whatever software they're licensing.
SarahKerrigan - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Yep.Intel sold quad-core Xeon E7's for impressively high prices for a similar reason.
Mikewind Dale - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Why couldn't you run a 16 core software license on a 24 core CPU? I run a 4 core licensed version of Stata MP on an 8 core Ryzen just fine.Ithaqua - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Compliance and lawsuits.You have to pay for all the cores you use for some software.
Yes if you're only running 4 cores on your 8 core Ryzen then your fine but Stata MP is using all 8, there could be a lawsuit.
Now for you I'm sure they wouldn't care. For a larger firm with 10,000+ machines, then that's going to be a big lawsuit.
arashi - Wednesday, March 17, 2021 - link
Some licenses charge for ALL cores, regardless of how many cores you would actually be using.