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AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

anandtech.com

21–30 of 109 posts

Re: AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

#21
post #5

Why so little L3 cache on the competition?

Limitations due to die size and power consumption since Intel Xeon is still on the ye olde 14nm++ process. Also since Xeon dies are monolithic, unlike AMDs chiplet design, means that increasing the size of certain components on the die, like cache for example, increases the risk of defects wich reduces the yields, making them unprofitable.

True, but the ARM ones have just 32MB for up to 80 threads.

I wonder if we could get numbers for L3 misses and cycles spent waiting for main memory under realistic workloads.

Re: AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it in the original press release (price for !K units, of course) https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/993/amd...

Still seems like a typo, it doesn't make any sense that the 24 / 48 would be priced between the 8 / 16 and the 16 / 32. Either the prices of the 73 and 74 were swapped or the tag is just plain wrong. "2900" is also very suspiciously round compared to every other price on the press release.

right, I think 3900 may be the correct price

Re: AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

#23
Hopefully they can fix their idle power consumption with a firmware tweak or a new stepping, that's a massive regression. It looks like that causes a significant performance degradation too -- more of the power budget going to IO means less to the compute cores.

Re: AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it in the original press release (price for !K units, of course) https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/993/amd...

Still seems like a typo, it doesn't make any sense that the 24 / 48 would be priced between the 8 / 16 and the 16 / 32. Either the prices of the 73 and 74 were swapped or the tag is just plain wrong. "2900" is also very suspiciously round compared to every other price on the press release.

How is it suspicious?

256MB L3 (or really, 8 x 32MBs L3) and 24-cores suggests the bottom-of-the-barrel 3 cores active per 8-core CCX.

8x CCX with 3-cores. The yields on those chips must be outstanding: its like 62.5% of the cores could have critical errors and they can still sell it at that price.

EDIT: My numbers were wrong at first. Fixed. Zen3 is double-sized CCX (32MBs / CCX instead of 16MBs/CCX)

---------

In contrast, the 28-core 7453 is $1,570. I personally would probably go with the 28-core (with only 2x32MB L3 cache, or 64MBs) rather than the 24-core with 256MBs L3 cache.

For my applications, I bet that having 7-cores share an L3 cache (and therefore able to communicate quickly) is better than having 1 or 2 cores having 32MBs of L3 to themselves.

There are also significant price savings, as well as significant power / wattage savings with the 28-core / 64MBs model.

Re: AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

#25
post #5

Why so little L3 cache on the competition?

First off, it's not a direct comparison. The Epyc has one L3 cache per chiplet. This means that latency is not uniform across the entire L3 cache. This was a serious concern on the first generation of Epyc, where accessing L3 could take anywhere from zero to three hops across an internal network. AMD has greatly improved the problem on the more recent generations by switching to a star topology with more predictable latency.

That said, there are two major reasons:

1. Epyc is on a chiplet architecture. Large chips are harder to make than small ones. Building two 200mm^2 chips is cheaper than building one 400mm^2 chip. Since Epyc has a chiplet architecture, this means they can put more silicon into a chip for the same price. This means that Epyc can be just plain bigger than the competition. This comes with some complexity and inefficiency but has, so far, paid off in spades for them.

2. Epyc is on a newer process. This means AMD can fit more transistors even with the same area. Intel has had serious problems with their newer processes, so this is not an advantage AMD expected to have when designing the part. The use of a cutting-edge process was, in part, enabled by the chiplet architecture. It is possible to fabricate several small chips on a 7nm process even though one large chip would be prohibitively expensive, and AMD has been able to use a 14nm process in parts of the CPU that wouldn't benefit from a 7nm process to cut costs.

The first point is serious cleverness on the part of AMD. The second point is mostly that Intel dropped the ball.

Re: AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

#26
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the DC staff wears hearing protection when they're working among the racks.

That still blows my mind. Coming from telecom where everything prior to the #5 ESS was convection cooled, a happy office is a quiet office. Data got weird.

I'm assuming telecom had very different volume-power requirements. Where I grew up there were many mid-city phone switches that were large, concrete exterior, almost windowless, buildings.

Re: AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

#27
post #5

Why so little L3 cache on the competition?

EPYC is a split L3 cache. Any particular core only benefits from 32MBs of L3, the 33rd MB is "on another chip". (EDIT: Zen2 was 16MBs, Zen3 is 32MBs. Fixed numbers for Zen3) As such, AMD can make absolutely huge amounts of L3 cache (well, many parallel L3 clusters), while other CPU designers need to figure out how to combine the L3 so that a single core can benefit it from it all.

That's not quite accurate. Every core has access to the entire L3, including the L3 on an entirely different socket. CPUs communicate through caches, so if a core just plain couldn't talk to another core's cache then cache coherency algorithms wouldn't work. Though a core can access the entire cache, the latency is higher when going off-die. It is really high when going to another socket.

The first generation of Epyc had a complicated hierarchy that made latency quite hard to predict, but the new architecture is simpler. A CPU can talk to a cache in the same package but on a different die with reasonably low latency.

(I don't have numbers. Still reading.)

Re: AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

#28
post #20
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the DC staff wears hearing protection when they're working among the racks.

I wish that hearing protection had been required or at least offered when I used to visit data centers frequently. They made a big deal of the fire suppression training, but never even suggested ear plugs. 20 year-old me had no idea how bad that noise was for my ears. I hope the staff there were wearing plugs, but it was never apparent.

You only get one set of ears.

I suspect I still have the record for most expletives used in front of the headmaster at my old school because someone turned a few kW speaker on while I was wiring something under the stage - i.e. I wasn't pleased.

Re: AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

#29
post #5

Why so little L3 cache on the competition?

First off, it's not a direct comparison. The Epyc has one L3 cache per chiplet. This means that latency is not uniform across the entire L3 cache. This was a serious concern on the first generation of Epyc, where accessing L3 could take anywhere from zero to three hops across an internal network. AMD has greatly improved the problem on the more recent generations by switching to a star topology with more predictable…

What is the likelihood that mixed-process chiplets become the state of the art?

Re: AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan Review

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still seems like a typo, it doesn't make any sense that the 24 / 48 would be priced between the 8 / 16 and the 16 / 32. Either the prices of the 73 and 74 were swapped or the tag is just plain wrong. "2900" is also very suspiciously round compared to every other price on the press release.

How is it suspicious? 256MB L3 (or really, 8 x 32MBs L3) and 24-cores suggests the bottom-of-the-barrel 3 cores active per 8-core CCX. 8x CCX with 3-cores. The yields on those chips must be outstanding: its like 62.5% of the cores could have critical errors and they can still sell it at that price. EDIT: My numbers were wrong at first. Fixed. Zen3 is double-sized CCX (32MBs / CCX instead of 16MBs/CCX) --------- In co…

> In contrast, the 28-core 7453 is $1,570.

Which is cheaper than the 24c 7443 and 7413 but not the 16c 7343 and 7313.

And it only has half the L3 compared to its siblings (1/4th compared to the 7543 top end), a lower turbo than every other processor in the range (whether lower or higher core counts), well as an unimpressive base frequency, and a fairly high TDP by comparison (as high as the 7543).

The 74F3 has no such discrepancy, it has the same L3 as every other F-series and slots neatly into the range frequency-wise: same turbo as its siblings (with the 72 being 100MHz higher), 300MHz base lower han the 73, and 250 higher than the 75.

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