A Look At How The Linux Performance Has Evolved Since The AMD EPYC Launch

[wonko]

I'm a bit late to the article, but I'm curious what the configuration for the numpy test was. Is it using MKL or OpenBLAS as a backend? With the newer AMD processors the behavior is very different between the two. MKL is a bit faster, but uses a ridiculous amount of CPUs, like most of the cores at 100%. OpenBLAS is somewhat slower, but way less CPU usage.

[cyring]

Times kernel compilation is around 30's seconds but when I truly build a kernel with Intel NHM, SNB, SKL processors, it takes 20-30 minutes !

Answering to my remark:

wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/linux-4.9.tar.gz
tar -xvf linux-4.9.tar.gz
cd linux-4.9
make defconfig
time (make -s -j12 >/dev/null 2>&1)

real 2m36.120s
user 26m10.078s
sys 2m13.517s

156 seconds with a Gulftown Xeon CPU W3690 @ 3.47GHz - 12 threads

[GrayShade]

Two more:





I never catch number typos!

I don't care about misspelled words, but when Ubuntu 16 wins most benchmarks, a typo isn't the first explanation that comes to mid.

[torsionbar28]

Like intel, but instead its getting better with time

Ryzen and EPYC vs Skylake++++. It's just like the early 2000's all over again, when it was Athlon64/Opteron vs Netburst trash & dead-end Itanium. AMD FTW!

[cyring]

Times kernel compilation is around 30's seconds but when I truly build a kernel with Intel NHM, SNB, SKL processors, it takes 20-30 minutes !

[gsedej]

Like intel, but instead its getting better with time

[tildearrow]

Fixed now, thanks.

Two more:

This EPYC 7601 server was equipped with 128GB of DDR4 memory an an Intel Optane 900p 800GB NVMe SSD for storage.

These performance improvements are a clumination of both AMD/Zen-specific improvements

I never catch number typos!

[microcode]

FS operations: as much as twice as fast!

Glad to be an AMD customer right now. They performed adequately at launch, and now they're stellar.

[Michael]

I think "Ubuntu 16.04 + Linux 5.2 + No Spec" in the graphs should be "Ubuntu 19.04 + Linux 5.2 + No Spec".

Fixed now, thanks.

[Michael]

I think "Ubuntu 16.04 + Linux 5.2 + No Spec" in the graphs should be "Ubuntu 19.04 + Linux 5.2 + No Spec".

Whoops yeah typo.