AMD EPYC 7251 Provides Great Value At Less Than $500 USD

For those wanting a look at the performance-per-dollar of the Xeon Silver 4108 vs. EPYC 7251:

Overall the EPYC 7251 provides a lot of value for those interested in a sub-$500 workstation/server processor: worst case scenario is the perf-per-dollar is only comparable to the Xeon Silver 4108 but in many cases the EPYC 7251 offers much greater margins.

On the system power consumption front, the EPYC 7251 + TYAN Transport SX TN70A-B8026 combination led to an idle power use of 93 Watts, average power draw under load of 140 Watts, and a peak power draw of 171 Watts. This is higher than the Xeon Silver 4108 with a minimum power use of 54 Watts, average power use of 85 Watts, and the peak power use of 99 Watts. Not too surprising though considering the Xeon Silver 4108 has a TDP of 85 Watts while the EPYC 7251 has a TDP of 120 Watts.

The EPYC 7251 offers great value for those looking at a workstation/server processor under $500 USD. The EPYC 7251 blows past the Xeon Silver 4108 in multi-threaded workloads and also provides strong competition against Intel's earlier E3 and E5 Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake processors tested on Ubuntu 17.10. Overall the EPYC 7251 was faster than the Xeon Silver 4108 thanks to its higher base frequency, much larger L3 cache size, and two extra memory channels. About the only downsides are the higher power use of the EPYC 7251 and the continuing limited availability of EPYC processors from Internet retailers thus far.

Stay tuned to Phoronix for more tests forthcoming of the AMD EPYC 7351P / 7401P / 7551 as well as more continuing tests of the high-end EPYC 7601. Thanks to AMD for providing the 7251 review sample and TYAN for offering the Transport SX TN70A-B8026 as a great base platform for the EPYC Linux testing.