Friday, October 11th 2024
AMD EPYC "Turin" with 192 Cores and 384 Threads Delivers Almost 40% Higher Performance Than Intel Xeon 6
AMD has unveiled its latest EPYC processors, codenamed "Turin," featuring Zen 5 and Zen 5C dense cores. Phoronix's thorough testing reveals remarkable advancements in performance, efficiency, and value. The new lineup includes the EPYC 9575F (64-core), EPYC 9755 (128-core), and EPYC 9965 (192-core) models, all showing impressive capabilities across various server and HPC workloads. In benchmarks, a dual-socket configuration of the 128-core EPYC 9755 Turin outperformed Intel's dual Xeon "Granite Rapids" 6980P setup with MRDIMM-8800 by 40% in the geometric mean of all tests. Surprisingly, even a single EPYC 9755 or EPYC 9965 matched the dual Xeon 6980P in expanded tests with regular DDR5-6400. Within AMD's lineup, the EPYC 9755 showed a 1.55x performance increase over its predecessor, the 96-core EPYC 9654 "Genoa". The EPYC 9965 surpassed the dual EPYC 9754 "Bergamo" by 45%.
These gains come with improved efficiency. While power consumption increased moderately, performance improvements resulted in better overall efficiency. For example, the EPYC 9965 used 32% more power than the EPYC 9654 but delivered 1.55x the performance. Power consumption remains competitive: the EPYC 9965 averaged 275 Watts (peak 461 Watts), the EPYC 9755 averaged 324 Watts (peak 500 Watts), while Intel's Xeon 6980P averaged 322 Watts (peak 547 Watts). AMD's pricing strategy adds to the appeal. The 192-core model is priced at $14,813, compared to Intel's 128-core CPU at $17,800. This competitive pricing, combined with superior performance per dollar and watt, has resonated with hyperscalers. Estimates suggest 50-60% of hyperscale deployments now use AMD processors.
The Blue Empire is ready to strike back at AMD, with its upcoming "Sierra Forest" CPUs with up to 288 E-cores. Intel must deliver similar or greater performance metrics with its new E-core Xeon processor, keeping power consumption low and costs reasonable, so we expect to see a heated battle in the server space between Intel and AMD. Besides more cores, "Sierra Forest" will bring 12-channel DDR5 memory, so the massive core count will get adequate memory bandwidth. Until then, AMD has the crown of performance, efficiency, and value, and we are curious to see this driving competition and further innovation from both sides.
Source:
Phoronix
These gains come with improved efficiency. While power consumption increased moderately, performance improvements resulted in better overall efficiency. For example, the EPYC 9965 used 32% more power than the EPYC 9654 but delivered 1.55x the performance. Power consumption remains competitive: the EPYC 9965 averaged 275 Watts (peak 461 Watts), the EPYC 9755 averaged 324 Watts (peak 500 Watts), while Intel's Xeon 6980P averaged 322 Watts (peak 547 Watts). AMD's pricing strategy adds to the appeal. The 192-core model is priced at $14,813, compared to Intel's 128-core CPU at $17,800. This competitive pricing, combined with superior performance per dollar and watt, has resonated with hyperscalers. Estimates suggest 50-60% of hyperscale deployments now use AMD processors.
11 Comments on AMD EPYC "Turin" with 192 Cores and 384 Threads Delivers Almost 40% Higher Performance Than Intel Xeon 6
Intel doubled the cores from 64 to 128 in one generation, had the performance crown for two weeks and then was majorly owned by AMD.
By the way, this was the Intel performance increase going from 64 to 128 cores:
38%!?!?!
I'm pretty sure that's more than all the x64 CPU cores I've ever bought.
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Aside from that, AMD's architecture is actually something quite nice and closer to a clean-sheet design vs Intel's Skylake (Core?) architecture that has been patched and iterated on for almost a decade.
The security patches from the last decade have also gimped Intel's performance more than AMD's performance.
Finally, what comes to mind is chiplets (and related packaging). AMD used chiplets earlier, got comfortable with them on both CPUs and GPUs, and maximized the PPA (performance, power, area) variables where as Intel is still experimenting with chiplets in a earlier stage of adoption. Intel has a lot of advanced packaging technology but all of it is still on the roadmaps and in the product pipelines.
Finally (for real this time), software has rapidly improved for AMD as server revenues increase. AMD was catching up with Intel on the architecture front and using TSMC's catching up process nodes during a time when AMD software was far behind Intel's. Now it is far more even of a fight so even if Intel neutralizes AMD's other advantages, AMD's software is finally benefiting from a decade of reinvestment and a half-decade of increased customer adoption and feedback.
A few days ago, just out of curiosity, I tried to look for parts (CPU, motherboard, cooler, RAM, chassis, etc.) to assemble an EPYC CPU PC in online stores, but I couldn't find all the parts, even after searching on several websites.
Even on DELL's website, it's difficult for a home user to buy a blade (or a "PC") like this with hundreds of cores. On DELL's website, "compatibility error" frequently appears.