AMD EPYC 9554 & EPYC 9654 Benchmarks - Outstanding Performance For Linux HPC/Servers

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 10 November 2022 at 02:30 PM EST. Page 2 of 15. 52 Comments.

AMD kindly provided the Titanite reference platform and the EPYC 9004 Genoa processors for this review and Linux benchmarking. For today's launch review the tested server processors included:

- EPYC 75F3
- EPYC 75F3 2P
- EPYC 7713
- EPYC 7713 2P
- EPYC 7763
- EPYC 7763 2P
- EPYC 7773X
- EPYC 7773X 2P
- EPYC 9554
- EPYC 9554 2P
- EPYC 9654
- EPYC 9654 2P
- Xeon Platinum 8362
- Xeon Platinum 8362 2P
- Xeon Platinum 8380
- Xeon Platinum 8380 2P

All of these processors were freshly tested/re-tested using Ubuntu 22.10 with the Linux 6.0 kernel and GCC 12. More details on the software stack below.

For the new EPYC Genoa processors I tested the EPYC 9554 and 9654 both in the default "performance" determinism mode as well as in the BIOS switching over to the "power" determinism mode for those curious about the overall performance impact of the determinism control from the BIOS. The "- Power" suffix Genoa results are when running in the power determinism mode over the default performance determinism. All other BIOS settings for each of the tested Intel/AMD processors were at their respective defaults. Both 1P and 2P testing was carried out on all of the available tested processors.

Given my usual "bleeding edge" and forward-looking focus, all of these benchmarks were carried out from Ubuntu 22.10 with its GCC 12.2 stock compiler. For a fresh kernel look, Linux 6.0 was in use. This same software stack was used across all of the servers/processors tested. Each of the configurations was running with memory at its maximum rated speed and memory channel configuration. All of the CPUs were tested using the "performance" CPU frequency scaling governor.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS though is in good shape for EPYC Genoa too and I have ran tests of these EPYC 9004 series processors on Ubuntu 22.04 with its Linux 5.15 kernel, but for my look at Linux performance looking ahead and wanting to use the very latest upstream software, this round of benchmarking was done with Ubuntu 22.10 + Linux 6.0 across all of the tested server processors.

To no real surprise, the AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processor support for Linux is in good shape for launch. Using a distribution with a recent version of the Linux kernel (or an enterprise Linux distribution with its back-ported/patched kernels) should be in good shape for these Zen 4 server processors. There are some features that only landed recently like the updated Last Branch Record handling, but all key functionality is already in place -- including temperature and power consumption monitoring. On the compiler side the Zen 4 (znver4) support is tardy. AMD only recently posted their initial Znver4 enablement patch while carrying over the cost tables from Znver3. That initial support will be found in GCC 13 due out in the early months of next year and the LLVM/Clang 16.0 support is pending. AMD is expected to issue a new AOCC release soon for their AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler with Zen 4 optimizations.

AMD EPYC Genoa Zen 4 Linux Review

During the benchmarking a wide selection of server/HPC benchmarks were carried out while also monitoring the CPU power consumption from the exposed RAPL interfaces and providing per-benchmark performance-per-Watt metrics and more.

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