Sizing Up Servers: Intel's Skylake-SP Xeon versus AMD's EPYC 7000 - The Server CPU Battle of the Decade?
by Johan De Gelas & Ian Cutress on July 11, 2017 12:15 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Intel
- Xeon
- Enterprise
- Skylake
- Zen
- Naples
- Skylake-SP
- EPYC
AMD’s EPYC 7000-Series Processors
As announced back at the official launch, AMD is planning to hit both the dual socket and single socket markets. With up to 32 cores, 64 threads, 2TB/socket support and 128 PCIe lanes per CPU, they believe that by offering a range of core counts and frequencies, they have the nous to attack Intel, even if it comes at a slight IPC disadvantage.
AMD’s main focus will be on the 2P parts, where each CPU will use 64 PCIe lanes (using the Infinity Fabric protocol) to connect to each other, meaning that in a 2P system there will still be 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes to go around for add-in devices. There will be the top four SKUs available initially, and the other parts should be in the hands of OEMs by the end of July. All the CPUs will have access to all 64MB of the L3 cache, except the 7200-series which will have access to half.
The new processors from AMD are called the EPYC 7000 series, with names such as EPYC 7301 and EPYC 7551P. The naming of the CPUs is as follows:
EPYC 7551P
- EPYC = Brand
- 7 = 7000 Series
- 30/55 = Dual Digit Number indicative of stack positioning / performance (non-linear)
- 1 = Generation
- P = Single Socket, not present in Dual Socket
So in the future, we will see second generation ‘EPYC 7302’ processors, or if AMD scales out the design there may be EPYC 5000 processors with fewer silicon dies inside, or EPYC 3000 with a single die but for the EPYC platform socket (obviously, those last two are speculation).
But starting with the 2P processors:
AMD EPYC Processors (2P) | |||||||||
Cores Threads |
Frequency (GHz) | L3 | DRAM | PCIe | TDP | Price | |||
Base | All | Max | |||||||
EPYC 7601 | 32 / 64 | 2.20 | 2.70 | 3.2 | 64 MB | 8-Ch DDR4 2666 MT/s |
8 x16 128 PCIe |
180W | $4200 |
EPYC 7551 | 32 / 64 | 2.00 | 2.55 | 3.0 | 180W | >$3400 | |||
EPYC 7501 | 32 / 64 | 2.00 | 2.60 | 3.0 | 155W/170W | $3400 | |||
EPYC 7451 | 24 / 48 | 2.30 | 2.90 | 3.2 | 180W | >$2400 | |||
EPYC 7401 | 24 / 48 | 2.00 | 2.80 | 3.0 | 155W/170W | $1850 | |||
EPYC 7351 | 16 / 32 | 2.40 | 2.9 | 155W/170W | >$1100 | ||||
EPYC 7301 | 16 / 32 | 2.20 | 2.7 | 155W/170W | >$800 | ||||
EPYC 7281 | 16 / 32 | 2.10 | 2.7 | 32 MB | 155W/170W | $650 | |||
EPYC 7251 | 8 / 16 | 2.10 | 2.9 | 120W | $475 |
The top part is the EPYC 7601, which is the CPU we were provided for in this comparison. This is a 32-core part with simultaneous multithreading, a TDP of 180W and a tray price of $4200. As the halo part, it also gets the good choice on frequencies: 2.20 GHz base, 3.2 GHz at max turbo (up to 12 cores active) and 2.70 GHz when all cores are active.
Moving down the stack, AMD will offer 24, 16 and 8-core parts. These will disable 1, 2 and 3 cores per CCX respectively, as we saw with the consumer Ryzen processors, and is done in order to keep core-to-core latencies more predictable (as well as keeping access to all the L3 cache). What is interesting to note is that AMD will offer a 32-core part at 155W (when using DDR4-2400) for $3400, which is expected to be very competitive compared to Intel (and support 2.66x more DRAM per CPU).
The 16-core EPYC 7281, while having half the L3, will be available for $650, making an interesting 2P option. Even the bottom processor at the stack, the 8-core EPYC 7251, will support the full 2TB of DRAM per socket as well as 128 PCIe lanes, making it a more memory focused SKU and having almost zero competition on these sorts of builds from Intel. For software that requires a lot of memory but pays license fees per core/socket, this is a nice part.
For single socket systems, AMD will offer the following three processors:
AMD EPYC Processors (1P) | |||||||||
Cores Threads |
Frequency (GHz) | L3 | DRAM | PCIe | TDP | Price | |||
Base | All | Max | |||||||
EPYC 7551P | 32 / 64 | 2.0 | 2.6 | 3.0 | 64 MB | 8-Ch DDR4 2666 MT/s |
8 x16 128 PCIe |
180W | $2100 |
EPYC 7401P | 24 / 48 | 2.0 | 2.8 | 3.0 | 155W/170W | $1075 | |||
EPYC 7351P | 16 / 32 | 2.4 | 2.9 | 155W/170W | $750 |
These processors mirror the specifications of the 2P counterparts, but have a P in the name and slightly different pricing.
219 Comments
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Kaotika - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11464/intel-announce...This one remains wrong though
Ian Cutress - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Always reference the newest piece, especially the main review.Or we'd spend half of our time going back and updating old pieces and reviews with new data.
scottb9239 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
On the POV-RAY benchmark, shouldn't that read as almost 16% faster than the dual 2699 v4 and 32% faster than the dual 8176?scienceomatica - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
I think that a fair game would be to compare the top offer of one and the other manufacturer, in other words, the Xeon 8180 should be included in the benchmark regardless of the aspect of the price. Then the difference would be quite in favor of the Intel processor, although it has few cores less.Tamz_msc - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Will we get to see more FP HPC-oriented workloads like SPECfp2006 or even 2017 being discussed in a future article?lefty2 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
I can summarize this article: "$8719 chip beaten by $4200 chip in everything except database and Appache spark."Well done Intel, another Walletripper!
Shankar1962 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Then why did google att aws etc upgraded to skylake. They could have saved billions of dollars.Shankar1962 - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Look at what big players upgrading to skylake reportedThese are real workloads
No one cares about labs
These numbers decide who wins and who loses
No wonder AMD sells at $4200
https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/...
nitrobg - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Pricing on page 10 should reflect that the 2P EPYC prices are for 2 processors, not per CPU. The price of Xeons is per CPU.coder543 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
That doesn't seem true. The prices they currently have seem to be correct. Got a source?