AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Make For Compelling Budget Servers, Leading Performance & Value Over Xeon E

While this summer has been a busy season of benchmarking with the new AMD EPYC Bergamo processors providing up to 128-cores / 256-threads per socket and the new EPYC Genoa-X parts providing up to 1.1GB of L3 cache with 3D V-Cache to provide for excellent HPC performance, not everyone needs such levels of performance nor having the budget for such platforms. It's always fun talking about the high-end server platforms, but at the opposite end AMD and their platform partners have been rolling out an equally interesting assortment of AMD Ryzen 7000 series based server products. With the Ryzen 9 7950X/7950X3D providing up to 16-cores / 32-threads, a growing number of Ryzen server motherboards supporting DDR5 ECC UDIMM, and a number of innovative Ryzen server platforms coming to market, it's an interesting time to be after a budget-friendly server platform or other robust rackmount systems where looking for power efficient 16 cores or less configurations.

AMD and ASRock Rack recently sent over the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T as a very interesting 1U rackmount barebobes server built for the Ryzen 7000 series processors. This 1U Ryzen server platform supports the entire Ryzen 7000 series product line-up, supports up to four DDR5 DIMMs and can handle both DDR5 ECC/non-ECC UDIMMs, provides four hot-swap 3.5-inch SATA drive bays, one full-height PCI Express 4.0 x16 adapter, dual 10 GbE Ethernet, dual 1GbE Ethernet, and has HDMI and DisplayPort outputs for headed use-cases. Plus there's IPMI remote management via an ASpeed AST2600 BMC and the other usual features for standard server platforms.

Back with the AMD Ryzen 5000 series AMD began making a splash for budget-friendly Ryzen servers and now with the Ryzen 7000 series there are many more server platform options available, the Ryzen 7000 series CPUs are all the more versatile with efficient AVX-512 and other new features, and greater ecosystem maturity around AMD Ryzen on servers. That maturity has been both for the hardware platforms as well as the software with the Ryzen 7000 series having great open-source Linux support and features like Ryzen 7000 series EDAC support and more.

While the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T represents a standard 1U server platform for Ryzen 7000 series processors with DDR5 ECC UDIMM support, there's also been more unique products launching this year such as Supermicro's Microcloud that provides for Ryzen 7000 series based blades -- up to 8 blades per chassis, each potentially with up to 128GB of DDDR5 per node and any Ryzen 7000 series CPU.

ASRock Rack also has several interesting Ryzen motherboards for AM5 server use-cases, including multiple deep mini-ITX and micro-ATX designs for edge deployments, passively cooled small form factor builds, and other cases where wanting a petite but potent server. In addition to ASRock Rack and Supermicro, Giga Computing (Gigabyte) has been another vendor with a range of Ryzen 7000 series motherboards and servers. So while with prior-generation Ryzen 5000 series servers it was a slow start and not too many options, it's refreshing to see a growing ecosystem around Ryzen 7000 series for servers.

But let's dive more into the AMD Ryzen 7000 series Linux performance for servers.