Sizing Up Servers: Intel's Skylake-SP Xeon versus AMD's EPYC 7000 - The Server CPU Battle of the Decade?
by Johan De Gelas & Ian Cutress on July 11, 2017 12:15 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Intel
- Xeon
- Enterprise
- Skylake
- Zen
- Naples
- Skylake-SP
- EPYC
AMD’s EPYC 7000-Series Processors
As announced back at the official launch, AMD is planning to hit both the dual socket and single socket markets. With up to 32 cores, 64 threads, 2TB/socket support and 128 PCIe lanes per CPU, they believe that by offering a range of core counts and frequencies, they have the nous to attack Intel, even if it comes at a slight IPC disadvantage.
AMD’s main focus will be on the 2P parts, where each CPU will use 64 PCIe lanes (using the Infinity Fabric protocol) to connect to each other, meaning that in a 2P system there will still be 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes to go around for add-in devices. There will be the top four SKUs available initially, and the other parts should be in the hands of OEMs by the end of July. All the CPUs will have access to all 64MB of the L3 cache, except the 7200-series which will have access to half.
The new processors from AMD are called the EPYC 7000 series, with names such as EPYC 7301 and EPYC 7551P. The naming of the CPUs is as follows:
EPYC 7551P
- EPYC = Brand
- 7 = 7000 Series
- 30/55 = Dual Digit Number indicative of stack positioning / performance (non-linear)
- 1 = Generation
- P = Single Socket, not present in Dual Socket
So in the future, we will see second generation ‘EPYC 7302’ processors, or if AMD scales out the design there may be EPYC 5000 processors with fewer silicon dies inside, or EPYC 3000 with a single die but for the EPYC platform socket (obviously, those last two are speculation).
But starting with the 2P processors:
| AMD EPYC Processors (2P) | |||||||||
| Cores Threads |
Frequency (GHz) | L3 | DRAM | PCIe | TDP | Price | |||
| Base | All | Max | |||||||
| EPYC 7601 | 32 / 64 | 2.20 | 2.70 | 3.2 | 64 MB | 8-Ch DDR4 2666 MT/s |
8 x16 128 PCIe |
180W | $4200 |
| EPYC 7551 | 32 / 64 | 2.00 | 2.55 | 3.0 | 180W | >$3400 | |||
| EPYC 7501 | 32 / 64 | 2.00 | 2.60 | 3.0 | 155W/170W | $3400 | |||
| EPYC 7451 | 24 / 48 | 2.30 | 2.90 | 3.2 | 180W | >$2400 | |||
| EPYC 7401 | 24 / 48 | 2.00 | 2.80 | 3.0 | 155W/170W | $1850 | |||
| EPYC 7351 | 16 / 32 | 2.40 | 2.9 | 155W/170W | >$1100 | ||||
| EPYC 7301 | 16 / 32 | 2.20 | 2.7 | 155W/170W | >$800 | ||||
| EPYC 7281 | 16 / 32 | 2.10 | 2.7 | 32 MB | 155W/170W | $650 | |||
| EPYC 7251 | 8 / 16 | 2.10 | 2.9 | 120W | $475 | ||||
The top part is the EPYC 7601, which is the CPU we were provided for in this comparison. This is a 32-core part with simultaneous multithreading, a TDP of 180W and a tray price of $4200. As the halo part, it also gets the good choice on frequencies: 2.20 GHz base, 3.2 GHz at max turbo (up to 12 cores active) and 2.70 GHz when all cores are active.
Moving down the stack, AMD will offer 24, 16 and 8-core parts. These will disable 1, 2 and 3 cores per CCX respectively, as we saw with the consumer Ryzen processors, and is done in order to keep core-to-core latencies more predictable (as well as keeping access to all the L3 cache). What is interesting to note is that AMD will offer a 32-core part at 155W (when using DDR4-2400) for $3400, which is expected to be very competitive compared to Intel (and support 2.66x more DRAM per CPU).
The 16-core EPYC 7281, while having half the L3, will be available for $650, making an interesting 2P option. Even the bottom processor at the stack, the 8-core EPYC 7251, will support the full 2TB of DRAM per socket as well as 128 PCIe lanes, making it a more memory focused SKU and having almost zero competition on these sorts of builds from Intel. For software that requires a lot of memory but pays license fees per core/socket, this is a nice part.
For single socket systems, AMD will offer the following three processors:
| AMD EPYC Processors (1P) | |||||||||
| Cores Threads |
Frequency (GHz) | L3 | DRAM | PCIe | TDP | Price | |||
| Base | All | Max | |||||||
| EPYC 7551P | 32 / 64 | 2.0 | 2.6 | 3.0 | 64 MB | 8-Ch DDR4 2666 MT/s |
8 x16 128 PCIe |
180W | $2100 |
| EPYC 7401P | 24 / 48 | 2.0 | 2.8 | 3.0 | 155W/170W | $1075 | |||
| EPYC 7351P | 16 / 32 | 2.4 | 2.9 | 155W/170W | $750 | ||||
These processors mirror the specifications of the 2P counterparts, but have a P in the name and slightly different pricing.
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CajunArson - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Would a high-end server that was built in 2014 necessarily update? Maybe not.Should a high-end server with a brand new microarchitecture use the most recent version of the software if it has any expectation of seeing a real benefit? Absolutely.
If this was a GPU review and Anandtech used 2 year old drivers on a new GPU (assuming they even worked at all) we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Home users playing video games are in a different environment than you find in a business datacenter. There's a lot less money to be lost when a driver update causes a performance regression or eliminates a feature. Conversely, needlessly updating software in the aforementioned datacenter can result in the loss of many millions if something goes wrong.wallysb01 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Conversely, having stuff working, but unnecessarily slowly costs money as well. Its a balance, and if you're spending hundreds of thousands or even millions on a cluster/data center/what have you, you'd probably want to spend at least a little bit of time optimizing it, right?Icehawk - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Most of the businesses I have worked for, ranging from 10 people to 50k, use severely outdated software and the barest minimum of patching. Optimization? HA!For example I work for a manufacturer & retailer currently, our POS system was last patched in 2012 by the vendor and has been replaced by at least two versions newer. We have XP machines in each of our stores as that is the only OS that can run the software.
The above is very typical. The 50k company I worked for had software so old and deeply entrenched that modernizing it is virtually impossible. My current company is working on getting to a new product... that was new in 2012 and has also been replaced with a newer version. Whee!
Icehawk - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
One other thing - maybe the big shops actually do test/size but none of the places I have worked at and have been involved in do any testing, benchmarking, etc. They just buy whatever their preferred vendor gives them that meets the budget and they *think* will work. My coworker is in charge (lol) of selecting servers for a new office... he has no clue what anything in this article is. He has never read a single review, overview, or test of a processor. I could keep going on like this :(0ldman79 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Icehawk's comments are so accurate it is scary.I can't tell you how many businesses running custom *nix software running in a VM on a Windows server.
They're not all about speed. Reliability is the single most important factor, speed is somewhere down the line. The people that make those decisions and the people that drink coffee while they're waiting on the machines are very different.
Neither understand that it could all be done so much better and almost all of them are utterly terrified at the concept of speeding up the process if it means *any* changes are made.
JohanAnandtech - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
We did test with NAMD 2.12 (Dec 2016).sutamatamasu - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Glad, AMD make back again to this segment, now we can only see what can Raja to do for server market with Radeon instinct.Kaotika - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
So this confirms that the previous information regarding Skylake-X core configurations was wrong, and 12-core variant is in fact using HCC-core instead of LCC-core?Ian Cutress - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
We corrected that in our Skylake-X review.