AMD EPYC 7502 + EPYC 7742 Linux Performance Benchmarks

For summing up the performance from dozens of benchmarks carried out, below is a look at the geometric mean of the raw performance for these launch-day benchmarks.

The new EPYC leader, the 7742, delivered 72% better performance than the previous flagship processor, the EPYC 7601. Keep in mind there is twice the number of cores/threads. In a 2P configuration, the EPYC 7742 delivered 58% better performance over the EPYC 7601 2P in this mix of workloads to varying degrees of scaling. The EPYC 7502 as a 32-core part like the 7601 yielded a 39% advantage or 31% in a 2P configuration. A single EPYC 7742 at $6950 USD or dual EPYC 7502 (combined $5200) came out just ahead of Intel's Xeon Platinum 8280 that retails for $10k a pop. Even the single Xeon Platinum 8280 was slightly edged out by a lone EPYC 7502 processor.

AMD EPYC 7002 processors are certainly leading with regards to performance over Intel's (non-AP) Cascadelake processors and absolutely dominating when it comes to performance-per-dollar, but what about performance-per-Watt? For this launch-day testing that is a bit harder to properly quantify: the AMD Daytona reference server does have some very powerful fans and other component differences that would be inaccurate to compare the overall AC system power consumption between the different servers being benchmarked.

For looking exclusively at the CPU power consumption in real-time, Intel has long been exposing those counters under Linux with their RAPL driver infrastructure. Unfortunately for AMD Zen CPUs, there isn't any driver/infrastructure for readily exposing the CPU power consumption under Linux. I've lobbied AMD to provide such a driver similar to their older fam15h_power driver during the Bulldozer days, but we'll see what comes of that. Though recently a Phoronix reader in the forums did mention of an out-of-tree Zenpower driver developed independently of AMD using their public Zen documentation. I was able to get that working in time for launch-day with some tweaks for Rome, so do have some basic power consumption figures to share today.

These power consumption numbers are on the Intel side queried using their RAPL interfaces while on the AMD EPYC processors were using the Zenpower driver. The power consumption recorded is the combined power usage of both sockets/processors.

The EPYC 7742 2P was pulling around 60 more Watts than the EPYC 7601 2P previous-generation part under multi-threaded workloads, which isn't bad considering the 7742 has twice the number of cores. The EPYC power consumption was slightly higher than the 8280 Cascadelake processors.

But when looking at the performance-per-Watt, the EPYC 7742 tended to lead still by a significant margin. This was also found to be the case in other multi-threaded tests with the performance-per-Watt of 7nm Rome being comparable to (or well exceeding in highly threaded workloads) Cascadelake while being a big improvement over the previous-generation EPYC processors. More power / perf-per-Watt metrics will come as time allows.

Each day for the past three to four weeks I've been hitting up the EPYC 7742 and EPYC 7502 Rome processors with different Linux workloads and I continue to be truly mesmerized by the performance potential particularly with the 7742 now having a 128-core / 256-thread server in a two socket configuration and each of those CPUs having a 225 Watt TDP. AMD has shown their modern engineering leadership potential with Zen2/Rome and that on-time delivery while Intel continues struggling getting their 10nm products out the door and continuing to face various speculative execution vulnerabilities. This combination of AMD's engineering victory and Intel's stumbles have led to the EPYC 7002 series line-up being incredibly primed for success. The raw performance of the EPYC 7502/7742 has been fantastic against the Cascadelake Xeon Platinum 8280 and a big uplift compared to the original EPYC processors while the performance-per-dollar is phenomenal compared to Intel and the 7nm EPYC processors also deliver competitive performance-per-Watt while offering many more cores.

Stay tuned for more AMD EPYC Rome Linux benchmarks on Phoronix and thanks to AMD and Intel for providing their server CPU review samples.