AMD EPYC Milan Review Part 2: Testing 8 to 64 Cores in a Production Platform
by Andrei Frumusanu on June 25, 2021 9:30 AM ESTSPEC - Per-Core Performance under Load
A metric that is actually more interesting than isolated single-thread performance, is actually per-thread performance in a fully loaded system. This actually is a measurement and benchmark figure that would greatly interest enterprises and customers which are running software or workloads that are possibly licensed on a per-core basis, or simply workloads that require a certain level of per-thread service level agreement in terms of performance.
It’s also here where AMD’s new low-core count SKUs are extremely interesting, allowing to really distinguish themselves:
Starting off with the EPYC 7343 and the 7443, what’s really interesting to see here is that they’re both well keeping up with the more expensive 75F3 SKU in terms of per-thread performance. The EPYC 7343 actually outperforms the 7443 in the FP test suite because it has 33% less cores to share the L3 cache, and 50% less cores it has to share the DRAM resources against.
The 72F3 here also showcases its extreme positioning in the SKU stack, having the full 32MB L3 dedicated to a single core, and with the full 8-channel DRAM resources shared only amongst 8 cores, it results it outstandingly good per-thread performance. The chip when running 2 threads per core actually still outperforms the per-thread performance of other higher density core count SKUs running only 1 thread per core.
A good visualisation of the socket throughput versus per-thread performance metrics is plotting the various datapoints in a chart on those two axes:
For today’s review, the 7763 and 75F3 move further to the right and higher than they were before, while the new 7443 and 7343 showcase a quite stark competitive situation against Intel’s Xeon 6330.
The Xeon 6330 costs $1894, while the 7443 and 7343 respectively land in at $2010 and $1563. In terms of socket throughput, the Intel chip roughly matches the 16-core AMD counterpart, while the AMD chip is showcasing 48-75% better performance per thread. The 24-core 7443 showcases 26-32% more socket performance while also at the same time having 47-54% better per-thread performance, while only being priced 6% higher. It seems that it’s clear which designs provide the better value.
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Threska - Sunday, June 27, 2021 - link
Seems the only thing blunted is the economics of throwing more hardware at the problem. Actual technical development has taken off because all the chip-makers have multiple customers across many domains. That's why Anandtech and others are able to have articles like they have.tygrus - Sunday, June 27, 2021 - link
Reminds me of the inn keeper from Les Miserables. Nice to your face with lots of good promises but then tries to squeeze more money out of the customer at every turn.tygrus - Sunday, June 27, 2021 - link
I was ofcourse referring to the SW not the CPU.130rne - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link
What the hell did I just read? Just came across this, I had no idea the enterprise side was this fucked. They are scalping the ungodly dog shit out of their own customers. So you obviously can't duplicate their software in house meaning you're forced to use their software to be competitive, that seems to be the gist. So I buy a stronger cpu, usually a newer model, yeah? And it's more power efficient, and I restrict the software to a certain number of threads on those cpus, they'll just switch the pricing model because I have a better processor. This would incentivize me to buy cheaper processors with less threads, yeah? Buy only what I need.130rne - Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - link
Continued- basically gimping my own business, do I have that right? Yes? Ok cool, just making sure.eachus - Thursday, July 15, 2021 - link
There is a compelling use case that builders of military systems will be aware of. If you have an in-memory database and need real-time performance, this is your chip. Real-time doesn't mean really fast, it means that the performance of any command will finish within a specified time. So copy the database on initialization into the L3 cache, and assuming the process is handing the data to another computer for further processing, the data will stay in the cache. (Writes, of course, will go to main memory as well, but that's fine. You shouldn't be doing many writes, and again the time will be predictable--just longer.)I've been retired for over a decade now, so I don't have any knowledge of systems currently being developed.
Who would use a system like this? A good example would be a radar recognition and countermeasures database. The fighter (or other aircraft) needs that data within milliseconds, microseconds is better.
hobbified - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link
At the time I was involved in that (~2010) it was per-core, with multiple cores on a package counting as "half a CPU" — that is, 1 core = 1CPU license, two 1-core packages = 2CPU license, one 2-core package = 1CPU license, 4 cores total = 2CPU license, etc.I'm told they do things in a completely different (but no less money-hungry) way these days.
lemurbutton - Friday, June 25, 2021 - link
Can we get some metrics on $/performance as well as power/performance? I think the Altra part would be better value there.schujj07 - Friday, June 25, 2021 - link
"Database workloads are admittedly still AMD’s weakness here, but in every other scenario, it’s clear which is the better value proposition." I find this conclusion a bit odd. In MultiJVM max-jOPS the 2S 24c 7443 has ~70% the performance of the 2S 40c 8380 (SNC1 best result) despite having 60% the cores of the 8380. In the critical-jOPS the 7443's performance is between the 8380's SNC1 & SNC2 results despite the core disadvantage. To me that means that the DB performance of the Epyc isn't a weakness.I have personally run the SAP HANA PRD performance test on Epyc 7302's & 7401's. Both CPUs passed the SAP HANA PRD performance test requirements on ESXi 6.7 U3. However, I do not have scores from Intel based hosts for comparison of scores.
schujj07 - Friday, June 25, 2021 - link
The DB conclusion also contradicts what I have read on other sites. https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7763-review-... Look at the MariaDB numbers for explanation of what is being analyzed. Their 32c Epyc &543p vs Xeon 6314U is also a nice core count vs core count comparison. https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-gold-6314u... In that the Epyc is ~20%+ faster in Maria than the Xeon.