EPYC 7642/7742 vs. Xeon Platinum 8280 Performance With Intel-Recommended Benchmarks

Here are the latest numbers in our ongoing AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" series benchmarking. This time around for some curiosity over the weekend is a look at the EPYC 7642 and EPYC 7742 up against the Xeon Platinum 8280 all in 2P configurations while running benchmarks publicly recommended by Intel in one of their whitepapers. Even going by Intel-recommended tests, the EPYC 7642/7742 deliver significantly better performance and cost savings over the comparable Xeon Platinum 8280.

One of my weekend "hobbies" is always scouring whitepapers, scientific papers, and GitHub (among other sources) looking for interesting and new benchmarks/workloads to incorporate into the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org. After all, there are 384 different official benchmarks part of our open-source benchmarking framework and from there 1,404 different versions of those benchmarks from the past 11+ years of developing the Phoronix Test Suite for open-source and fully-automated benchmarking.

Recently I stumbled across this Intel whitepaper with Intel's own recommended benchmarks to be used for the public procurement of computers. Of the Linux-compatible tests, the Phoronix Test Suite already supports many of the benchmarks listed from Gromacs to SPECjbb to NAMD and others. (Some of the tests mentioned in the whitepaper are Windows-only.) From that list of benchmarks there were a few not yet found in the Phoronix Test Suite like MiniFE and expanding ASKAP to cover CPU tests rather than just their GPU-focused implementations. Besides running the benchmarks off Intel's guidance for "fun", the testing is also useful as there are a few tests that I previously haven't given much exposure to the EPYC 7002 series processors in the lab.

So after adding the relevant and interesting tests to the Phoronix Test Suite that weren't in there already, I was curious to check on the Xeon Cascade Lake vs. EPYC Rome performance from this sub-set of tests recommended by Intel for use in the public procurement of systems. So here are those benchmarks for some weekend benchmark results.

Tested were the EPYC 7742, EPYC 7642, Xeon Platinum 8280, and the EPYC 7601 for previous-generation comparison -- all tests this round done in the dual socket configuration. Thanks to AMD and Intel for the processors under test. All the servers were running Ubuntu 19.10 atop Intel Optane 900p 280GB NVMe storage and with system RAM at the optimal frequency/channels for each processor.