AMD EPYC 9965 "Turin Dense" Delivers Better Performance/Power Efficiency vs. AmpereOne 192-Core ARM CPU
Complementing the AMD EPYC 9575F / 9755 / 9965 performance benchmarks article looking at those Turin processors up against prior AMD EPYC CPUs and the Intel Xeon competition, this article is looking squarely at the 192-core EPYC 9965 "Turin Dense" processor compared to Ampere Computing's AmpereOne A192-32X flagship processor. It's an x86_64 vs. AArch64 battle at the leading 192 core count for performance and CPU power efficiency.
This article is on its own separate from the other EPYC and Xeon comparisons due to a subset of the benchmarks/workloads being in good shape / similar quality on AArch64. As well as with the EPYC 9965 and AmpereOne A192-32X being the same core count it's an interesting for a 1:1 match-up for battling it out for performance and power efficiency. Due to having only had the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR AmpereOne server for a few weeks and having had to return it to Ampere Computing after the reviews/benchmarking, the EPYC 9965 comparison was against some previously collected AmpereOne data I carried out using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS like the EPYC Turin reviews.
The AmpereOne A192-32X features 192 cores, a 3.2GHz clock frequency, 64MB cache, 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 5, and eight channel DDR5-5200 memory while having a rated usage power of 276 Watts.
The AMD EPYC 9965 features 192 cores of Zen 5C "Turin Dense" with SMT to provide for 384 threads per socket, a 2.25GHz base clock frequency, 3.7GHz boost frequency, 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 5, 12 channel DDR5-6000 memory (or DDR5-6400 in some environments), 384MB L3 cache, and a 500 Watt TDP. See the AMD EPYC 9005 series overview for more information on these new Turin CPUs.
Pricing is very interesting between the two. The A192-32X has a list price of merely $5,555 USD while the EPYC 9965 is at $14,813. So the AmpereOne A192-32X has a big lead on pricing, but it remains to be seen if that SBV pricing is accurate or how well it will be priced among distributors/retailers as well as what AmpereOne server pricing will look like. As of writing I haven't found the AmpereOne processors in stock at any prominent Internet retailers nor any immediate/in-stock AmpereOne server availability yet to be able to accurately compare total cost of ownership (TCO).
As I've written in the various AmpereOne articles over the past month, it's too bad that it has taken so long to ramp up production of AmpereOne after talking about it for two years going. If AmpereOne had been readily available even one year ago it would have been going up against the 128-core Bergamo at the top end and would have been out before Intel's 144-core Sierra Forest processors, etc. Instead it's only ramping up and becoming generally available now at a time when 5th Gen AMD EPYC is arriving. So now there are 192 core AMD Turin Dense CPUs that can compete at the same core count.
Due to the AmpereOne server tested only being a single socket solution, the 1:1 comparison here is just with a single EPYC 9965 processor but in today's other Xeon/EPYC comparison are both 1P and 2P EPYC 9965 results for those interested.