Initial Benchmarks Of The AMD EPYC 7601 On Ubuntu Linux

The AMD EPYC 7601 + Tyan B8026T70AE24HR system was tested with 8 x 16GB DDR4-2666 RDIMMs (128GB) and 240GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD. The Tyan dual Xeon Gold system was tested with 12 x 8GB DDR4-2666 RDIMMs with the Xeon Golds being a six memory channel design rather than eight with EPYC. The Xeon Gold system is also using a Samsung 850 as its main storage medium for our tests. The other Xeon systems were also using memory at their maximum rated frequency / channel configuration.

All of these systems were running Ubuntu 17.04 with the Linux 4.13 kernel. For this initial testing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS wasn't used or any other LTS/enterprise distribution in first wanting to see how the very latest Linux support is for EPYC. With Ubuntu 17.04 and the Linux 4.13 upgrade is the newer kernel and also GCC 6.3.0 rather than an older compiler on an enterprise release, etc. But as mentioned already, I will be doing a Linux distribution benchmark roundup/comparison on EPYC in the near future for seeing how the kernel, compiler configuration, and other packages are affecting this AMD server performance.

This testing was also done with the stock configuration of the Ubuntu kernel, meaning the CPUFreq Ondemand / P-State powersave governors were used on the respective systems. This doesn't end up being a big deal as all of the tests ran for this comparison were longer-running, heavier tests allowing the system plenty of time to reach their peak performance states so as to not impact the final result. And it's what the out-of-the-box Ubuntu Server experience happens to be. Anyhow, with the power / performance-per-Watt testing will also be a comparison of the different governor options for EPYC, among other possible tuning articles to come.

For this initial testing a variety of CPU-focused multi-threaded benchmarks were run given the focus of this AMD server platform. Among the tests run in a fully-standardized and reproducible manner via the Phoronix Test Suite included the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, Parboil, Rodinia, John The Ripper, x264, timed Linux kernel compilation, timed LLVM compilation, C-Ray ray-tracing, Primesieve prime number generation, OpenSSL, and Darktable RAW photography software. Additional tests will come in the many follow-up articles planned.

The EPYC 7601 tests were run both stock and when running under numactl --interleave=all for enforcing the NUMA interleaving policy as recommended by AMD.

Thanks to the test automation and standardization driven by the Phoronix Test Suite, if you want to see how your own Linux system(s) compare to the results about to be shown, it can be done in a trivial manner once installing the Phoronix Test Suite. Simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1709124-TY-EPYCXEON177 to conduct your own automated from start to finish, side-by-side benchmark comparison.