AMD EPYC 7003 Series Performance In The Cloud With Microsoft Azure HBv3 HPC VMs

First up is QuantLib, which is the popular open-source quantitative finance library. This test case is not multi-threaded but allows us to look at the per-core Azure HPC performance across all these generations tested. Going from the prior EPYC 7V12 Rome to EPYC 7V13 Milan VM yielded a 33% improvement in performance. Notably this also allowed the AMD-based HPC VM to outperform the Azure HC Xeon Scalable VM. It will be interesting to see how the Azure HBv3 performance compares to the latest Intel Ice Lake processors once available in the public cloud.

While on the financial area, the FinanceBench performance also allowed AMD to jump into the top spot with the Azure HBv3 virtual machines while also delivering the best performance per dollar.

With the HPCG industry benchmark there was a 5% improvement from HBv2 to HBv3 for this HPC benchmark. All of the AMD HPC VMs were well ahead of the Intel-based HPC VMs with the lower core counts.

The CloverLeaf hydrodynamics benchmark was one of the cases where the 1st Gen Xeon Scalable processors powering the Azure HC instance were able to outperform the HBV2 Rome VM but now with EPYC Milan that is no longer the case.

The EPYC 7V12 and 7V13 based VMs offer the same core counts, which is double of what was available with the HV1 / EPYC 7551, but even so there is indeed much uplift to find with Milan.