Opteron vs. EPYC Benchmarks & Performance-Per-Watt: How AMD Server Performance Evolved Over 10 Years

First up was the embarrassingly parallel test with NAS Parallel Benchmarks. For a heavily threaded test like this, going from a single Opteron 2300 series to the EPYC 7601 yielded around a 40x increase in performance. Not bad when also considering it was only a 16x increase in the thread count (4 physical cores to 32 cores / 64 threads). The EPYC 7601 has a lower base clock frequency than the Opteron 2300 CPUs tested but has a turbo/boost frequency higher, among many architectural advantages over these K10 Opterons.

With the NASA test's Lower-Upper Gauss-Seidel solver, going from the dual Opteron 2384 processors to a single EPYC 7601 yields around a 25x improvement in performance over the past decade of AMD server CPUs.

Or in looking at the performance-per-Watt with the LU.C test, it's also around a 25x improvement over these older Opterons.

John The Ripper's Blowfish performance is up by 10x going from an Opteron 2384 to EPYC 7601.

And on a performance-per-Watt basis, it's an improvement of about 8x.