
Dual AMD EPYC 7742 Crushes Quad Intel Xeon 8180M's in Geekbench 4 - rbanffy
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dual-amd-epyc-7742-vs-quad-intel-xeon-platinum-8180m,40288.html
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localhost
"You're getting 24.83% more performance while costing 73.29% less."

This is a terrible performance summary. Let's try to normalize it in terms of
Geekbench points / $:

    
    
      Intel = 155050 / $52044 =  2.97 / $
      AMD   = 193554 / $13011 = 14.88 / $
    

AMD has a 5x advantage on the price of the CPU alone, not factoring in the
price of the motherboard and other components (this is a 4 socket Intel
motherboard vs. a dual socket AMD).

5X. That's incredible.

~~~
joemag
Interesting pricing decision by AMD. Given their performance, and no other
competition in x86 market besides Intel, surprised they chose to sell at such
a steep discount.

Sometimes, such pricing decisions can perpetuate “you are a weaker substitute”
perception.

~~~
catexception
You are correct that customers that already use both Intel and AMD would
likely choose AMD over Intel even with a price difference of 10% if they were
deciding on price/performance ratio. However, I think it's likely that AMD is
trying to win market share from customers that are currently mostly using
Intel. In my humble opinion that strategy is paying off now that more big
shops such as Amazon AWS have AMD options.

~~~
localhost
Lisa Su is on record as talking about revenue / market share being a key
focus:[1]

“We are always looking to increase our market share. That’s why we put out
great products. As it relates to our market share targets, for server what
we’ve said is we can achieve double digit market share from 4-6 quarters from
the end of 2018.”

[1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14579/all-ryzen-qa-with-
amd-c...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14579/all-ryzen-qa-with-amd-ceo-dr-
lisa-su)

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frou_dh
The articles will keep flowing for months/years and it'll become conventional
wisdom that Epyc always pummels Intel. Intel marketing must be on Defcon 1.

~~~
hunta2097
The only thing holding up Intel at the moment is their gaming IPC.

Should AMD crack that then it'll be brutal for them (if it isn't already).

~~~
archi42
Marketing aside: Is the gaming IPC that /practically/ relevant? I mean, I'm
gaming on a early-2012 Sandy Bridge CPU (Xeon E3-1235 aka "cheap i7-2600"),
and it feels like my late-2013 R9 290 is the limiting factor these days, not
the CPU.

And I am actually considering to combine my NAS and workstation/gaming rig
into one "big" Ryzen 3xxx or 3rd gen TR machine and banish it into the
basement. Bonus: The NAS finally gets ECC, and if I put in my old GPU and a
new GPU, I can have two VMs for game streaming (tried parsec this weekend, and
it was really nice!). Only drawback I can see is that I'd have to carry the
rig upstairs once every blue moon when I play VR games.

~~~
akhilcacharya
I was doubting this for a while but there are finally games now that will
bottleneck a 2012 era CPU. I’m planning a Ryzen upgrade for this purpose.

~~~
archi42
Oh, which games? The part of me who's still a child is looking for a GOOD
reason to justify the spending to the part of me who is now a responsible
adult (and to my SO).

~~~
akhilcacharya
Not even super new games, but games like Deus Ex Mankind Divided and No Mans
Sky have better frame rates on my buddy's Ryzen 2 machine with otherwise
identical specs than my i5 3450.

The first game where I saw the difference was Battlefield 1.

~~~
dageshi
I think a lot of cross platform games have been optimised to use lots of CPU
cores, since the modern consoles currently have 8. If you're running an older
CPU with less cores, even if they're more powerful, you're starting to see
performance drags, that was especially the case for BF1.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
I'm seeing people's upgrade paths and I feel kinda guilty for holding on to my
i5-2400 for that long...

~~~
akhilcacharya
Don't feel that way at all, if anything I should feel guilty for thinking of
upgrading!

I'm probably going to survey the market early next summer before Cyberpunk.

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weare138
I'm not defending Intel or even particularly have a positive opinion of Intel
overall but I don't know how accurate this test is considering the difference
in Linux kernel versions used in this benchmark. According to the article the
Intel system is running a 3.10 kernel (doesn't say which distro but I'm pretty
sure it's RHEL 7 or CentOS 7) while the EPYC system is running Ubuntu 19.04
with the latest 5.0 kernel. Also I'm not sure if the 3.10 kernel they're
running on the Xeon system has been patched for Meltdown and Spectre which
would could also affect the performance. I doubt it would amount to a
significant difference in performance but usually benchmarks tests like this
use the same OS and software stack for the tests.

~~~
rbanffy
The performance per dollar is about 5 times better with the AMD box. I'm
_very_ sure no new kernel would be able to compensate for that.

~~~
weare138
Hence the reason I said I doubt it would make much of a difference but the 5.0
kernel generally outperforms 3.10. 3.10 has has already been deprecated and
isn't updated anymore. The EPYC 7742's are still going to trounce the Xeon's
but the Xeon's would probably have better real world performance on the latest
5.0 kernel and a recent distro versus kernel 3.10 and a dated distro like
RHEL/CentOS 7. As I mentioned before, typically the same version of OS is used
in these types of benchmarks.

~~~
bubblethink
RHEL backports the hell out of their kernels. They are monstrosities. The
would not make any money if their OS performed significantly worse than the
competition. Remember how much RHEL costs. And phoronix routinely does these
performance tests across kernel versions. There is not that much difference. I
think in one of his recent tests he even went back to ubuntu 12.04.

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sascha_sl
This is big because to a lot of people at lower scale, price doesn't matter as
much as compute density. AMD now excells in all 3 relevant criteria: density,
initial cost and running cost (e.g. power)

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Tomminn
Amateur in this space. What are the barriers to AMD taking Intel's market
share?

~~~
fnord123
OEM and data centres are the big accounts. Power consumption is crucial to
battery life in remote devices (in this case, laptops) and electricity is
roughly 50% of the cost of a super computer over five years (a lot of it is
for cooling, and it's presumably less for data centres used for cloud or
storage).

If Dell sells more laptops with AMD and Amazon rents more AMD instances (m5ad,
r5ad: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amd-epyc-powered-
amazon...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amd-epyc-powered-amazon-
ec2-m5ad-and-r5ad-instances/)) then AMD should be quite happy.

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wmf
The 8180M is a "money is no object" processor so people who buy it won't
really care about price/performance. It would be more interesting to compare
Rome against something like a 6212U or 2x6252.

~~~
fulafel
I wonder if there is any research into price elasticity of CPUs at the high
end. How high could you price a marginally faster one before you stopped
selling any?

~~~
wmf
Intel and the server OEMs definitely have this information but they're not
going to share it. Considering the costs of terabytes of RAM and software like
HANA or Oracle, there's room in the market for some pretty expensive CPUs.

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beezle
"The Geekbench 4 benchmark holds little to no relevance in the enterprise
world. Nevertheless, it gives us a small taste of how AMD's EPYC 7002-series
can provide enterprises with more bang for their buck."

And then they go right ahead and make 'comparisons' based on irrelevant
workloads. Not saying AMD isn't faster or better price/perf but please do the
benchmarks properly. Same can be said of comparison of POWER 9 vs amd/intc.

~~~
gameswithgo
People like to say "synthetic benchmarks have no relevance to the real world"
to sound smart, but that isn't ever entirely true. They are all relevant to
soem degree. Somewhere in the world is a real task that looks like any given
synthetic benchmark. The danger is that the real world use cases that show
some relevance with the synthetic benchmark may be more or less rare.

In this case, there are whole suites of benchmarks and real applications that
have been compared between the new Epyc's and the Xeons and the only time Xeon
has been on part with Epyc that I have seen so far is AVX-512 specific
workloads. It is possible there may be some workloads where the worse ram
latency of Epyc is a penalty that cannot be overcome by the larger L3 cache
size. That used to be an issue on the previous gen Epyc, but the infinity
fabric is faster now and the L3 caches are twice as big.

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KaiserPro
As configured it should be using 1/3rd less power than the intel, which is
something volume players will be keen on.

It will be interesting to see what volume prices are like.

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jsf01
Datacenter usage seems to be increasing in importance faster than PC, too.
AMD’s edge here bodes really well for their future.

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tapirl
> 54 / 128 Cores / Threads

Should it be 64/128?

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hatsuseno
According to AMDs specs ( [https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-
epyc-7742](https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-epyc-7742) ), yes, it
should.

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mattcriswell
I'm not sure how much it matters but it seems the two systems were running
vastly different kernels.

~~~
cptskippy
Would it be better if they ran the same kernel optimized by Intel|AMD? Isn't
that what use to happen when everything was compiled with Intel's compilers?

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brnt
As much as I hate edgy 'Gamer' names, it seems AMD's new CPU does live up to
its name.

~~~
wolfgke
> As much as I hate edgy 'Gamer' names, it seems AMD's new CPU does live up to
> its name.

EPYC is AMD's _server_ CPU series.

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Epyc&oldid=911736...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Epyc&oldid=911736718)

~~~
brnt
It is however a 'gamer' type name.

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dagw
TL:DR

"You're getting 24.83% more performance while costing 73.29% less."

~~~
KaiserPro
2/3rds the power budget.

