The Linux Performance For AMD Rome vs. Intel Cascade Lake One Year After Launch

With the Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors having turned a year old in April and next month marking one year since the launch of the AMD EPYC 7002 (Rome) series, here are fresh benchmarks of the dual Xeon Platinum 8280 versus the AMD EPYC 7742 when testing the Linux software stack from early 2019 and then again using a bleeding-edge Linux software stack as of this month. This shows how the Linux software performance has evolved over the past year for both Intel and AMD on the server front as well as how the current top-end SKUs are competing right now.

The Xeon Platinum 8280 2P and EPYC 7742 2P servers were first re-tested using Ubuntu 19.04 as the software state around the time of the Cascade Lake launch and also what the software experience was like for the AMD Rome launch as the newest Ubuntu version at the time.

Following that was then testing using an Ubuntu 20.10 development snapshot for the very latest Ubuntu software packages. Additionally, the Linux 5.8 Git kernel was pulled in for the very latest Linux kernel code as of right now. Additionally, the GCC 10.1 code compiler was also used for the newest C/C++ compiler as of this year.

On both Ubuntu 19.04 and the "Ubuntu 2020" software stack, the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were set to "-O3 -march=native" but otherwise was a rather stock software setup except where otherwise noted. Both servers were similarly equipped with 32GB DIMMs populating all memory channels and at their respective optimal memory frequencies. A Micron 9300 4TB NVMe solid-state drive was used on both servers.

Update: It's also worth noting on the Ubuntu 20.10 test stack there was a change where at the time the performance governor was the default rather than the ondemand/powersave that is normally the default on Ubuntu. More tests forthcoming.

This is quite a straight-forward look at how the latest Linux software performance is for Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 and AMD EPYC 7742 so let's get right to these numbers. Via the Phoronix Test Suite there were 116 benchmarks being run in each of the configurations.