Dissecting Intel's EPYC Benchmarks: Performance Through the Lens of Competitive Analysis
by Johan De Gelas & Ian Cutress on November 28, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Intel
- Xeon
- Skylake-SP
- Xeon Platinum
- EPYC
- EPYC 7601
Database Performance & Variability
Results are very different with respect to transactional database benchmarks (HammerDB & OLTP). Intel's 8160 has an advantage of 22 to 29%, which is very similar to what we saw in our own independent benchmarking.
One of the main reasons is data locality: data is distributed over the many NUMA nodes causing extra latency for data access. Especially when data is locked, this can cause performance degradation.
Intel measured this with their own Memory Latency Checker (version 3.4), but you do not have rely on Intel alone. AMD reported similar results on the Linley Processor conference, and we saw similar results too.
There is more: Intel's engineers noticed quite a bit of performance variation between different runs.
Intel engineers claim that what they reported in the first graph on this page is, in fact, the best of 10 runs. Between the 10 runs, it is claimed there was a lot of variability: ignoring the outlier number 2, there are several occasions where performance was around 60% of the best reported value. Although we can not confirm that the performance of the EPYC system varies precisely that much, we have definitely seen more variation in our EPYC benchmarks than on a comparable Intel system.
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smilingcrow - Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - link
TSX has been implemented but how about ASF?CajunArson - Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - link
Incidentally, for anybody who think Intel "cheated" with those numbers there's concrete proof from independent third-party reviewers that at least the GROMACS benchmark results that Intel itself is showing are not fully accurate... as in they are not fully accurate in *AMD's favor*.Here's a link to GROMACS results from Serve the Home that are actually using the newest version that finally turns on the AVX-512 support to show you what the Xeon platform was actually designed to do: https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
So just remember that Intel is being pretty conservative with these numbers if their own published GROMACS results are anything to go by.
MonkeyPaw - Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - link
I would hope they’d be conservative in this sector. I’m guessing very knowledgeable people will be making the buying decisions here, and there may even be contractual expectations from the purchasing companies. Over promising and under delivering on an internal report might not just cost a few big sales, they might even result in lawsuits.tamalero - Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - link
I think the problem is while intel usually uses the most optimized compilers and systems. They usually do not optimize the intel systems at all. At least in the consumer benchmarks.Not so sure about these enterprise because I have no idea what most of these tests do.
jjj - Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - link
The biggest lie is through omission, the bulk of the volumes is at rather low ASP so if you are gonna test test 1k$ and bellow SoCs and use the I/O offered by each.eek2121 - Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - link
I would be interested to see how AMD EPYC processors with lower core counts perform in the database benchmarks, as they should have few NUMA nodes.CajunArson - Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - link
Wrong. You clearly don't understand how Epyc works. Literally every Epyc chip has the same number of NUMA nodes regardless of core count from the 7601 all the way down to the super-stripped down parts.Each chip has 4 dies that produce the same number of NUMA nodes, AMD just turns off cores on the lower-end parts.
Maybe you should have actually learned about what Epyc was instead of wasting your time posting ignorant attacks on other people's posts.
eek2121 - Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - link
The same goes for you. My ignorance with EPYC stems from poor availability and the lack of desire to learn about EPYC. You seem to have a full time job trolling on AnandTech. Go troll somewhere else.IGTrading - Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - link
Chill guys :)Reading your posts I see you're both right, just using examples of different use cases.
P.S. Cajun seems like a bit of an avid Intel supporter as well, but he's right : in AVX512 and in some particular software, Intel offers excellent performance.
But that comes at a price, plus some more power consumption, plus the inability to upgrade (considering what Intel usually does to its customers) .
iwod - Tuesday, November 28, 2017 - link
poor availability - do dell offer AMD now?