Linux 5.6 Tests On AMD EPYC 7742 vs. Intel Xeon 8280 2P With 100+ Benchmarks

The latest benchmarks for your viewing pleasure are looking at the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 performance up against the dual AMD EPYC 7742 CPUs while using the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel as the first time trying out these highest-end server processors on this new kernel debuting as stable in about one month's time.

These tests are intended to offer a fresh look at the Linux 5.6 performance between the Xeon Platinum 8280 and EPYC 7742 2P servers and besides the new kernel version what kicked off this round of testing as well was for some last minute testing/evaluation of the big Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 feature update. In particular, checking in on many of the tests once more and also for more test data to push through the visual improvements to the PDF generator and graphing code. So take these results as you wish, even if it just means for checking out the PDF generation improvements.

With these tests on Linux 5.6, nearly 200 benchmarks were run as part of this test run. Keep in mind with all these tests there is a mix of both single and multi-threaded workloads, with this not serving as a CPU review but just passing along these data points for reference while also showing off the PDF and graphing changes with Phoronix Test Suite 9.4.

Even with the diverse mix of single and multi-threaded tests and some of them not being conventional "server" workloads, the AMD EPYC Rome performance continued to dominate.

Across the diverse mix of tests, the EPYC 7742 2P performance still came out 1.18x the speed of the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 server that also costs much more.

Those wanting to dig through all the numbers in full can find them via the PDF results summary. Besides graph improvements, Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 improves the PDF table handling, adds the PDF bookmark support, includes per-suite geometric means at the end of the result file, and other enhancements for open-source automated benchmarking. Here is the high-level overview of the results for those short on time:

Those wishing to generate their own off Phoronix Test Suite data can do so from the improved Phoronix Test Suite results viewer or by simply running phoronix-test-suite result-file-to-pdf [result identifier]. As always, your feedback for making the PDFs and graphs more useful or even just more attractive, is welcome.