Opteron vs. EPYC Benchmarks & Performance-Per-Watt: How AMD Server Performance Evolved Over 10 Years

By now you have likely seen our initial AMD EPYC 7601 Linux benchmarks. If you haven't, check them out, EPYC does really deliver on being competitive with current Intel hardware in the highly threaded space. If you have been curious to see some power numbers on EPYC, here they are from the Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026 2U server. Making things more interesting are some comparison benchmarks showing how the AMD EPYC performance compares to AMD Opteron processors from about ten years ago.

The EPYC 7601 as a refresher is a 32 core processor with 64 threads, 2.2GHz base clock frequency, 3.2GHz maximum turbo core speed, 64MB L3 cache, and has a 180 Watt TDP.

For showing how the performance and performance-per-Watt has evolved over the past decade, I ran some new tests on the AMD Opteron 2356 and AMD Opteron 2384 processors. These are the only working Opteron processors I have available for testing, but with being from 2007~2008, make for an interesting comparison in lining up for about one decade. The Opteron 2384 processors were also tested in a single and dual socket configuration. I pulled out the Tyan S2932 motherboard and sure enough the board was still running fine after all these years.

The AMD Opteron 2356 "Barcelona" 65nm quad-core processor has a 2.3GHz base frequency, 2MB of L3 cache and 512KB of L2 cache per core, and has a 95 Watt TDP.

The AMD Opteron 2384 "Shanghai" meanwhile was a 45nm quad-core processor with a 2.7GHz base frequency, 6MB of L3 cache and 512KB of L2 cache per core, and a 115 Watt TDP

These AMD Opteron 2300 series processors supported SSE4a and AMD-V as the new features at the time and handle DDR2-667 registered memory. At the time of its launch in 2008, the Opteron 2384 processors retailed for $989 USD.