AMD EPYC 7642 Benchmarks: The Rome 48 Core CPU That Easily Takes On Intel's Xeon Platinum 8280

Since the AMD EPYC 7002 series "Rome" launch at the beginning of August, it's been known how AMD's top-end (aside from the newly-announced EPYC 7H12) EPYC 7742 easily outperforms the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 in most real-world benchmarks. The EPYC 7742 not only outperforms the Xeon Platinum 8280 in raw performance but also at a significantly lower cost and it gets even better with the EPYC 7642. We have been testing the EPYC 7642 48-core processors and even there the performance is generally ahead of a Xeon Platinum 8280 while being about half the cost of that flagship non-AP Intel Xeon Scalable Cascadelake processor.

Complementing our recent EPYC 7302 and EPYC 7402 benchmarks, today we are focused on the EPYC 7642 as the Rome 48-core / 96-thread processor. This 48 core processor has a 2.3GHz base clock and 3.3GHz boost clock while having 256MB of L3 cache, eight DDR4-3200 memory channels, 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, and other features in common with the EPYC 7742 and other Rome processors. The EPYC 7642 carries a 50MHz base clock speed advantage over the 64 core EPYC 7742 but a 100MHz lower boost clock speed as the principal differences aside from the core/thread count. Both of these CPUs carry a 225 Watt TDP.

Compared to the EPYC 7742, the EPYC 7642 costs around two thousand dollars less with a list price of $4775 USD. However, as of writing I haven't been able to find any Internet retailer offering the CPU at that price. NewEgg currently lists the EPYC 7642 in stock for $5886 USD but even at that price is just under half the cost of the Xeon Platinum 8280. The Xeon Platinum 8280 meanwhile at around its $10k list price has 28 cores / 56 threads, 2.7GHz base frequency, 4.0GHz turbo frequency, and a 205 Watt TDP as the principal specs.

The processors tested for today's Linux benchmarking comparison based upon the CPUs I had available included:

- EPYC 7401P
- EPYC 7601
- EPYC 7601 2P
- EPYC 7302
- EPYC 7302 2P
- EPYC 7402
- EPYC 7402 2P
- EPYC 7502
- EPYC 7502 2P
- EPYC 7642
- EPYC 7642 2P
- EPYC 7742
- EPYC 7742 2P
- Xeon Gold 6138
- 2 x Xeon Gold 6138
- Xeon Platinum 8280
- 2 x Xeon Platinum 8280

Thanks go out to AMD for providing the EPYC CPUs under test and Daytona reference server, Intel to the Xeon Scalable 2nd Gen samples, and Gigabyte for the Xeon Scalable 2nd Gen server being used.

All of these Xeon and EPYC processors were tested with RAM at their optimal channel/frequency configurations, each server using Intel Optane 900p 280GB NVMe storage, and Ubuntu 19.04 running on each server. Ubuntu 19.04 was upgraded to running the Linux 5.3 kernel throughout for offering the very latest Intel/AMD Linux experience. Onwards with this latest round of Phoronix Test Suite server CPU benchmarking.