AMD EPYC 7401P: 24 Cores / 48 Threads At Just Over $1000

To no surprise, the EPYC 7401P delivers terrific value. The EPYC 7401P tended to outperform the Xeon Gold 6138, which retails for twice as much as this $1075 USD 24-core / 48-thread CPU.

Only offering greater value was the $750 USD EPYC 7351P that is the 16 core / 32 thread part.

The EPYC 7401P + Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026 configuration showed an idle power draw of 96 Watts, average power use of 182 Watts, and a peak power use of 237 Watts. The average power use under load with the 7401P was comparable to the 7601, but with a much lower peak power use. The peak power use of the 7401P was just a few Watts greater than the 7351P.

The EPYC 7401P is a very viable processor if you are looking for a single-socket server/workstation-class CPU for about $1000 USD and will be running highly-threaded workloads. The EPYC 7401P tended to compete with and largely outperform the Xeon Gold 6138 that retails for twice as much and is just a 20 core / 40 thread CPU.

For about $1,000 on the Intel Xeon Scalable side is just the Xeon Silver 4116 as a 12 core / 24 thread part with 2.1GHz base frequency / 3.0GHz turbo / 16.75MB L3 cache. Intel's 16+ core Xeon Gold CPUs retail starting at around $2,000 USD. So at around $1075 USD for a 24 core / 48 thread / 2.0GHz base / 3.0GHz boost / 64MB L3 cache and eight channel DDR4-2666 memory support and 128 PCI-E lanes, the value is outright incredible.

The Linux support is spot-on with modern Linux distributions and the only real caveats as mentioned previously is Linux 4.14+ for Secure Memory Encryption support and the Zen/EPYC temperature reporting support coming to Linux 4.15. Any recent Linux distribution overall from RHEL7 to Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS should play nicely with EPYC while of course the newer kernel/GCC can be beneficial in achieving maximum performance.

If you want to see how your own Linux system(s) compare to the results found in this article, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1710246-AL-EPYC7401P28 for your own fully-automated, side-by-side benchmark comparison.