AMD EPYC Milan Still Gives Intel Sapphire Rapids Tough Competition In The Cloud

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 30 March 2023 at 10:30 AM EDT. Page 2 of 8. 10 Comments.
LeelaChessZero benchmark with settings of Backend: BLAS. c3-highcpu-8 SPR was the fastest.

Leela Chess Zero as an open-source chess engine making use of a deep neural network is an interesting test case here. Sapphire Rapids enjoys significant uplift over Cascade Lake in this benchmark, which makes use of AVX-512 for speeding up this AI chess engine. With the Tau t2d-standard-8 it isn't far behind the c3-highcpu-8 instance. The Tau T2D has much stronger performance than the c2d-highcpu-8 even though both are based on EPYC Milan because Tau is backed by eight physical cores versus 4 cores plus SMT for the other tested VMs. The c2d-highcpu-8 performance here was comparable just to Cascade Lake. The Tau showing was great while the EPYC Genoa performance should be even better since with Zen 4 there is the (efficient) AVX-512 implementation already talked about widely. Leela Chess Zero performs great with my Zen 4 hardware locally and should provide much uplift over these Google Cloud AMD numbers thanks to the AVX-512.

LeelaChessZero benchmark with settings of Backend: BLAS. c3-highcpu-8 SPR was the fastest.

With the competitive pricing of the Tau T2D instances, the t2d-standard-8 on a performance-per-dollar basis comes in just behind the Sapphire Rapids C3 instance. On an hourly pricing basis, the t2d-standard-8 is about one cent per hour less than the c3-highcpu-8 VM.

miniBUDE benchmark with settings of Implementation: OpenMP, Input Deck: BM1. t2d-standard-8 AMD was the fastest.

With the miniBUDE HPC benchmark, the Tau t2d-standard-8 with its eight physical cores easily surpasses the c3-highcpu-8 Sapphire Rapids VM. Even more embarrassing, the c2d-highcpu-8 Milan instance matches the c3-highcpu-8 Sapphire Rapids performance!

miniBUDE benchmark with settings of Implementation: OpenMP, Input Deck: BM1. t2d-standard-8 AMD was the fastest.

With the strong AMD EPYC showing here, both AMD 8 vCPU instances tested deliver superior value over the tested Intel offerings.

NAMD benchmark with settings of ATPase Simulation, 327,506 Atoms. t2d-standard-8 AMD was the fastest.
NAMD benchmark with settings of ATPase Simulation, 327,506 Atoms. t2d-standard-8 AMD was the fastest.
nekRS benchmark with settings of Input: TurboPipe Periodic. t2d-standard-8 AMD was the fastest.
nekRS benchmark with settings of Input: TurboPipe Periodic. t2d-standard-8 AMD was the fastest.

In the case of NAMD and nekRS as two more HPC benchmarks, the Tau t2d-standard-8 instance delivered better performance than the Sapphire Rapids c3-highcpu-8 instance while costing less.

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