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AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

anandtech.com

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Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#2
> For those with little time: at the high end with socketed x86 CPUs, AMD offers you up to 50 to 100% higher performance while offering at a 40% lower price. Unless you go for the low end server CPUs, there is no contest: AMD offers much better performance for a much lower price than Intel, with more memory channels and over 2x the number of PCIe lanes. These are also PCIe 4.0 lanes. What if you want to more than 2 TB of RAM in your dual socket server? The discount in favor of AMD just became 50%.

Well isn't that a kick in the pants.

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#3
This should be interesting to watch. The new Ryzen CPUs are good, but the desktop market is a rather small portion of the overall CPU market which is dominated by server and laptop. AMD making inroads in the server space is where they _may_ actually be able to eat up some meaningful market share. That said, I wouldn't count the chickens before they've hatched here. AMD did this once before with opteron in ~2006. For them to have holding power they need to keep it up for several cycles, only then will the big fish jump ship. I expect Intel to respond with price cuts, they've been monopolizing the server market for a decade or so now without real competition so they can charge whatever they want. At least in theory since Intel owns fabs they should win a price war.

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#5
Page 4 (https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-gen/4) lines up AMD's prices, core counts, and frequencies with Intel's. AT says all these have 128 PCIe 4 lanes and support up to 4TB RAM aper socket.

Intel's own competitive analysis figured competition in servers "is likely to be the most intense in about a decade" (https://www.techpowerup.com/256842/intel-internal-memo-revea...). Sounds about right.

The AMD presentation had announcements from Azure and GCP but not Amazon.

How soon Intel gets Ice Lake ready for servers seems pretty relevant here.

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#6
Question: does anyone know whether the current generation of Google TPU uses PCIe 4.0 already? The POWER9 systems support PCIe 4.0 and last year Google confirmed they use them. If that TPU is 4.0 already then expect Google to buy an ungodly amount of these EPYC servers to match them as Intel have absolutely nothing to match here, not until 2021, next year Ice Lake is only rumored to ship with 26 cores tops.

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#7

I don’t understand the spec2006 results. In the first table, what are the units? In the second table, are positive or negative percentages good?

SPEC has a reference machine that they ran the benchmark on, the numbers given are (reference machine runtime)/(tested machine runtime). So bigger numbers mean it ran faster, positive percentages are good.

Re: AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

#10

Page 4 ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-gen/4 ) lines up AMD's prices, core counts, and frequencies with Intel's. AT says all these have 128 PCIe 4 lanes and support up to 4TB RAM aper socket. Intel's own competitive analysis figured competition in servers "is likely to be the most intense in about a decade" ( https://www.techpowerup.com/256842/intel-internal-memo-revea... ). Sounds about righ…

From the article, mid-2020 for the Ice Lake equivalent:

> Ice lake promises 18% higher IPC, eight instead of six memory channels and should be able to offer 56 or more cores in reasonable power envelope as it will use Intel's most advanced 10 nm process. The big question will be around the implementation of the design, if it uses chiplets, how the memory works, and the frequencies they can reach.

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