AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked
by Johan De Gelas on August 7, 2019 7:00 PM ESTMemory Subsystem: Bandwidth
As we have reported before, measuring the full bandwidth potential with John McCalpin's Stream bandwidth benchmark has become a matter of extreme tuning, requiring a very deep understanding of the platform.
If we used our previous binaries, both the first and second generation EPYC could not get past 200-210 GB/s. It gave the impression of running into a "bandwidth wall", despite the fact that we now had 8-channel DDR4-3200. So we used the results that Intel and AMD best binaries produce using AVX-512 (Intel) and AVX-2 (AMD).
The results are expressed in gigabytes per second.
AMD can reach even higher numbers with the setting "number of nodes per socket" (NPS) set to 4. With 4 nodes per socket, AMD reports up to 353 GB/s. NPS4 will cause the CCX to only access the memory controllers with the lowest latency at the central IO Hub chip.
Those numbers only matter to a small niche of carefully AVX(-256/512) optimized HPC applications. AMD claims a 45% advantage compared to the best (28-core) Intel SKUs. We have every reason to believe them but it is only relevant to a niche.
For the rest of the enterprise world (probably 95+%), memory latency has much larger impact than peak bandwidth.
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Cooe - Thursday, August 8, 2019 - link
Hexus got around ≈31,000 iirc.Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 8, 2019 - link
Funny enough, from what I've heard from other people who have tested it, it actually doesn't run all that well with dual EPYCs. Too many cores that are too fast, to the point that initialization times are starting to hold back performance.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 8, 2019 - link
I got a message from the Cinebench team at one point. They don't spawn/kill/respawn for each little segment: it's kept alive and just fed more data. CB20 is also designed to scale, given that CB15 freaked out above 32 cores or soprisonerX - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
Where is our resident Intel shill? Selling his INTC stock in a panic perhaps?abufrejoval - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
comiserating with the ARM server guysLord of the Bored - Thursday, August 8, 2019 - link
Not gonna lie, I scrolled straight to the comments to see the Intel fanboy spinning this. Instead I got a wall of... Call of Duty references, I think?PeachNCream - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
The fact that AMD released a product that breaks even HStewart's ability to defend shill for Intel should say something pretty epic about Epyc.Lord of the Bored - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
You ain't lyin' there. Seems the name was chosen well.Korguz - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
i bet, he would STILL but the intel cpu too. even though it costs more, slower and probably uses more power.Samus - Thursday, August 8, 2019 - link
I was just thinking if Trump doesn't crash the market with his shenanigans then AMD could be an incredibly good buy in the next few months. The first time they've been a good buy in awhile.Although a lot of my daytrader friends have always claimed AMD was a good short-term buy, which is partially true, but if they can keep momentum and Intel doesn't try strongarming them out of OEMs (you know, like they used too...)