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& Andrei Frumusanu on March 15, 2021 11:00 AM ESTDisclaimer June 25th: The benchmark figures in this review have been superseded by our second follow-up Milan review article, where we observe improved performance figures on a production platform compared to AMD’s reference system in this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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Casper42 - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
I'd really like to see you all test a 7543 to compare against the 75F3.If the Per Thread performance (Page 8) of that chip can beat the 7713, it might be a great option for VMware environments where folks want to stick to a single license/socket without needing the beastly 75F3
Casper42 - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
PS: I think it will also help come April and I hope you test multiple 32c offerings then too.Olaf van der Spek - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Why don't these parts boost to 4.5 - 5 GHz when using only one or two cores like the desktop parts?ishould - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Hoping to get an answer to this tooCalin - Tuesday, March 16, 2021 - link
Basically if you have three servers at 50% load you shut one off and now deliver power to only two servers running at 75% load.An idle server will consume 100+ watts (as high idle power is not an issue for server farms) - so by running two servers at 75% versus three at 50% you basically save 100 watts.
(in many cases, server farms are actually power - i.e. electrical energy delivery or cooling - limited).
coschizza - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
stabilityJon Tseng - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Probably something to do with thermals + reliability - recall in the datacenter theres a bunch of server blades stuffed into racks. Plus they are running 24/7. Plus the cooling system isn't generally as robust as on a desktop (costs electricity to run). Bottom line is that server parts tend to run at lower clocks than desktop parts for a mix of all of these reasons.Targon - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
Server processors are NOT workstations, they are not intended for tiny workloads where there might only be a few things going on at one time. if you want more cores but want to use the machine like a workstation, you go Threadripper.yeeeeman - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
quite underwhelming tbh..ballsystemlord - Monday, March 15, 2021 - link
You expected? AMD has been overwhelming for years now, give them some slack. They can't do it every year.