What are the implications? Higher perf and/or lower price?
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Another follow-up article: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7702p-review-redefinin...
AMD is offering incredible performance on every metric: single threaded, multithreaded, total RAM per socket, PCIe 4.0, power consumption, total performance, total price, performance for price, etc.
Outside of some very niche applications, the only reason someone would choose Intel for servers right now is because "no one ever got fired for choosing Intel."
AMD's Epyc Rome processors are truly excellent, best-in-class processors.
The benchmarks are not just "distributed compilation" either... that's a very misleading characterization. There was one compilation benchmark for the Linux kernel, and that's the only compilation benchmark I remember seeing.
No one benchmarks nginx because nginx can easily saturate the network card on a server without saturating the processor.
Here's a postgres benchmark: https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2002066-VE-XEONEPYC...
Or a rocksdb benchmark: https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2002066-VE-XEONEPYC...
MariaDB was a rare win for Intel: https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2002066-VE-XEONEPYC...
("rare win" is literally the wording used in the Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux55-...)
ServeTheHome had access to more comprehensive Intel hardware, so I preferred to link to their articles, but Phoronix saw more of the same stuff.
Intel was thoroughly destroyed in every Linux review of Rome vs Intel's latest that I've seen. Intel can eke out some rare wins when applications are heavily optimized for the nuances of their CPUs, but it's not guaranteed even then.
If you can't be bothered to read articles to understand the answer to the question you asked, then this is my last reply.
I didn't read those articles in the last 4 minutes because I read them when they were published. A massively parallel run of 7zip was a really stupid benchmark in August and it remains stupid today.
These other benchmarks are certainly more relevant but none of them jumps out at me as a killer claim. An EPYC 7402 with 50% more cores, drawing 80% more power, and costing 35% more dollars than a Xeon Silver 4216 delivers 24% more pgsql ops per second. What TCO equation do you plug that into? I would describe these results as mixed.
> These other benchmarks are certainly more relevant but none of them jumps out at me as a killer claim. An EPYC 7402 with 50% more cores, drawing 80% more power, and costing 35% more dollars than a Xeon Silver 4216 delivers 24% more pgsql ops per second. What TCO equation do you plug that into? I would describe these results as mixed.
That's some interesting cherry picking. If I may do some of my own...
- The Epyc 7642 is doing 66% more pg sql ops per second than the Silver 4216, but only using an average of 34% more power than the 4216.
- The Xeon Platinum 8253 is consuming about the same amount of power as the Epyc 7402, costs twice as much, and yet the 7402 is performing 34% faster.
The Xeon Silver 4216 is competitive in this one benchmark, and you declare that the results are "mixed". It gets thoroughly destroyed in tons of other benchmarks.
So, yes, if you will only ever run this specific version of MariaDB on this one server, then it might be a toss up... IF you don't benefit from using PCIe 4.0 to access more (or faster) SSDs, and you don't want to have the option of putting in more RAM.
AMD is consistently better in the overwhelming majority of benchmarks here, especially as you get away from the low end. Saying that Intel has one "toss up" victory in the low end category is not exactly a ringing endorsement to pick Intel here.