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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday July 13 2017, @08:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the an-"Epyc"-battle dept.

AnandTech compared Intel's Skylake-SP chips to AMD's Epyc chips:

We can continue to talk about Intel's excellent mesh topology and AMD strong new Zen architecture, but at the end of the day, the "how" will not matter to infrastructure professionals. Depending on your situation, performance, performance-per-watt, and/or performance-per-dollar are what matters.

The current Intel pricing draws the first line. If performance-per-dollar matters to you, AMD's EPYC pricing is very competitive for a wide range of software applications. With the exception of database software and vectorizable HPC code, AMD's EPYC 7601 ($4200) offers slightly less or slightly better performance than Intel's Xeon 8176 ($8000+). However the real competitor is probably the Xeon 8160, which has 4 (-14%) fewer cores and slightly lower turbo clocks (-100 or -200 MHz). We expect that this CPU will likely offer 15% lower performance, and yet it still costs about $500 more ($4700) than the best EPYC. Of course, everything will depend on the final server system price, but it looks like AMD's new EPYC will put some serious performance-per-dollar pressure on the Intel line.

The Intel chip is indeed able to scale up in 8 sockets systems, but frankly that market is shrinking fast, and dual socket buyers could not care less.

Meanwhile, although we have yet to test it, AMD's single socket offering looks even more attractive. We estimate that a single EPYC 7551P would indeed outperform many of the dual Silver Xeon solutions. Overall the single-socket EPYC gives you about 8 cores more at similar clockspeeds than the 2P Intel, and AMD doesn't require explicit cross socket communication - the server board gets simpler and thus cheaper. For price conscious server buyers, this is an excellent option.

However, if your software is expensive, everything changes. In that case, you care less about the heavy price tags of the Platinum Xeons. For those scenarios, Intel's Skylake-EP Xeons deliver the highest single threaded performance (courtesy of the 3.8 GHz turbo clock), high throughput without much (hardware) tuning, and server managers get the reassurance of Intel's reliable track record. And if you use expensive HPC software, you will probably get the benefits of Intel's beefy AVX 2.0 and/or AVX-512 implementations.

AMD's flagship Epyc CPU has 32 cores, while the largest Skylake-EP Xeon CPU has 28 cores.

Quoted text is from page 23, "Closing Thoughts".

[Ed. note: Article is multiple pages with no single page version in sight.]

Previously: Google Gets its Hands on Skylake-Based Intel Xeons
Intel Announces 4 to 18-Core Skylake-X CPUs
AMD Epyc 7000-Series Launched With Up to 32 Cores
Intel's Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs Have Nasty Microcode Bug
AVX-512: A "Hidden Gem"?


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  • (Score: 2) by r1348 on Saturday July 15 2017, @10:00AM (3 children)

    by r1348 (5988) on Saturday July 15 2017, @10:00AM (#539497)

    My AMD Kaveri laptop switches off if the CPU overheats.

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 15 2017, @10:16AM (2 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday July 15 2017, @10:16AM (#539501) Journal

    AMD Kaveri is from 2014. So quite wide question mark for 2006-2013.

    • (Score: 2) by r1348 on Saturday July 15 2017, @10:26AM (1 child)

      by r1348 (5988) on Saturday July 15 2017, @10:26AM (#539503)

      How is that relevant in an article about a 2017 chip?
      However I remember having a desktop with an Athlon 3400+ that had thermal throttling enabled. I can't be bothered to find out what year it was.

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 15 2017, @10:48AM

        by kaszz (4211) on Saturday July 15 2017, @10:48AM (#539506) Journal

        How is that relevant in an article about a 2017 chip?

        Because a chip this expensive perhaps sitting in a important machine better have some protection or it's a risky and unreliable investment. And chips made before will be of low price so they are also interesting due to the performance/price factor.

        And I think that because thermal protection ought to be so simple there's simply no excuse that it was missing in the first place.