
AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked - ksec
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-gen
======
DuskStar
> For those with little time: at the high end with socketed x86 CPUs, AMD
> offers you up to 50 to 100% higher performance while offering at a 40% lower
> price. Unless you go for the low end server CPUs, there is no contest: AMD
> offers much better performance for a much lower price than Intel, with more
> memory channels and over 2x the number of PCIe lanes. These are also PCIe
> 4.0 lanes. What if you want to more than 2 TB of RAM in your dual socket
> server? The discount in favor of AMD just became 50%.

Well isn't that a kick in the pants.

~~~
snazz
I'll be interested to see how long it will be before this devastates Intel's
business. At the moment, there's literally no reason to buy an Intel desktop
or server processor, so how many of the Intel purchases coming from OEMs and
big cloud companies are just because of contracts that might let up in a few
years?

~~~
devonkim
Come on, "literally no reason"? Maybe because AMD can't keep up with demand
for their new CPUs. I can't buy a Ryzen 3900X without paying substantially
inflated ebay prices, the BIOS issues out of the gate are super annoying, and
all of these factors are not necessarily technical or performance factors but
the fact is that I can get a 9900K right now with mature UEFI firmware on them
from reputable motherboard manufacturers, and then I can actually do something
with the hardware.

I've been holding out on building a desktop because I could go for a while
without it but my patience is wearing very thin after waiting months and now
having to wait even longer just to get CPUs in stock in the first place.

Intel's advantage is OEMs and sheer output volume, but the hyperscale
infrastructure folks are going to be shoring up AMD financially while Intel
has problems and maybe in two years or so of this nonsense AMD might be much
more of a serious decision, but as of this moment it isn't a slam dunk for AMD
at all.

~~~
chubbyrabbit
> I can't buy a Ryzen 3900X without paying substantially inflated ebay prices.

I'm experiencing the opposite. There has been so many deals on 3900X that I
have to constantly tell myself I don't need an upgrade.

~~~
devonkim
I am genuinely intrigued. I've been going to my local Microcenters in the DC
VA area for weeks now and they said they have gotten ZERO shipments in since
release day of the 3900X and have a couple 3700X maybe on shelves.

This doesn't necessarily completely invalidate my point though - distribution
by AMD is clearly needing some work when one region is drowning in 3900X
processors and a very wealthy metro area has none in retail channels.

~~~
Teknoman117
Odd. I was in Microcenter on Tuesday and they had a few 3900X's in the case.
When I was there closer to launch, there weren't any and they told me that
people would come in and ask for them before they even hit the shelf.

~~~
devonkim
Which Microcenter location though? The Fairfax one the employee in the section
on Sunday said the two boxes in the floor cases were 3700X and not 3900X
because the boxes for the 3900X are larger.

~~~
Teknoman117
Tustin, CA

------
aeleos
> "We designed this part to compete with Ice Lake, expecting to make some
> headway on single threaded performance. We did not expect to be facing re-
> warmed Skylake instead. This is going to be one of the highlights of our
> careers"

Looks like AMD expected Intel would actually start to fight back a few years
ago when AMD started the Zen and Rome cores, and AMD has been running full
steam ahead since then. Meanwhile, in reality, Intel dropped the ball and was
too slow to react, and now AMD has basically leapfrogged them. What a time to
be alive.

~~~
mktmkr
In the “what a time to be alive” category, this is essentially a repeat of
Opteron.

~~~
bri3d
Zen was originally led by the same person as Opteron/K8/Hammer, Jim Keller...
who now works for Intel.

I think the situation is a bit different this time around though as AMD’s bet
on TSMC is paying off in a major way while Intel continue to flounder in the
fab space.

~~~
_delirium
> AMD’s bet on TSMC is paying off in a major way

Going back a bit further, AMD spinning off GlobalFoundries and then shopping
around for fabs on the open market is definitely looking like a very good
decision with hindsight. GF has also, since then, run into problems rolling
out a next-gen node, and eventually cancelled their 7nm. Hard to say how much
you can credit AMD for foresight there vs getting lucky, but being
manufactured by TSMC vs. in-house has worked out well.

I don't think this was obvious at the time. Some people thought it was a good
move (obviously including the decision makers), but a good number of pundits
interpreted AMD giving up on a proprietary in-house fab and relying on
commercially available facilities as basically AMD throwing in the towel on
being able to compete head to head with Intel as an integrated chip
designer/manufacturer, relegating them to more the budget space. To be fair,
at the time (2009), TSMC processes were behind Intel's, so you would've had to
predict TSMC catching up and surpassing Intel.

~~~
holy_city
I don't think the foresight is in a particular manufacturer but in the fact
that each successive fab generation was becoming more prohibitively expensive
and more dominated by economies of scale.

I kind of want to see an analysis of the minimum viable volume of product to
justify a new fab process going back over the years. Today it's just not
feasible, compared to Noyce et al who could do it in their lab.

------
twotwotwo
Page 4 ([https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-
gen/4](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14694/amd-rome-epyc-2nd-gen/4)) lines up
AMD's prices, core counts, and frequencies with Intel's. AT says all these
have 128 PCIe 4 lanes and support up to 4TB RAM aper socket.

Intel's own competitive analysis figured competition in servers "is likely to
be the most intense in about a decade"
([https://www.techpowerup.com/256842/intel-internal-memo-
revea...](https://www.techpowerup.com/256842/intel-internal-memo-reveals-that-
even-intel-is-impressed-by-amds-progress)). Sounds about right.

The AMD presentation had announcements from Azure and GCP but not Amazon.

How soon Intel gets Ice Lake ready for servers seems pretty relevant here.

~~~
lettergram
From the article, mid-2020 for the Ice Lake equivalent:

> Ice lake promises 18% higher IPC, eight instead of six memory channels and
> should be able to offer 56 or more cores in reasonable power envelope as it
> will use Intel's most advanced 10 nm process. The big question will be
> around the implementation of the design, if it uses chiplets, how the memory
> works, and the frequencies they can reach.

~~~
twotwotwo
Right, depends on the things AT mentioned, but also on execution: whether the
the issues with 10nm are over (now that they've shipped some chips) or if
they'll also slow the scale-up to server-sized dies. Intel moving to chiplets
could certainly mitigate that risk some, with tradeoffs similar to the ones in
EPYC.

~~~
lettergram
Supposedly, they will only be shipping to select customers initially (and at
28 cores) in 2020.

------
aristophenes
I prefer the ServeTheHome review, this is more in their wheelhouse:
[https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7002-series-rome-
deliv...](https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7002-series-rome-delivers-a-
knockout/)

~~~
ksec
Yes but when I posted the Anandtech review the ServeTheHome review wasn't up
yet. Both are very decent review, I could only hope this get more upvote so
other could read on it as well.

------
bob1029
Absolutely brutal TCO improvements... I feel like this could start a new race
to the bottom with the hyper-scalers. The implications could be profound
considering how concentrated a huge portion of our global compute capacity is
these days.

Is there a hypothetical point at which it becomes cheaper to spend additional
capital in order to remove a perfectly-good Intel server in favor of a new AMD
server (considering potential savings on cooling+power+space)?

~~~
ken47
The best time to buy an EPYC Rome server was 10 years ago. The next best time
is today.

Edit: Okay, since some people are downvoting my joke, a more serious answer --
if your server farm is running out of space, and you're currently looking at
renting additional space to accommodate your growth, EPYC Rome will take up
substantially less space for a given level of performance. This is one case
where it may make sense to instantly replace.

Another is to test EPYC Rome on a limited basis, to evaluate potential for a
larger scale replacement in the future -- I think many companies in the space
are going to fall into this camp.

Hence in the near future, there will be a modest increase EPYC Rome uptake,
followed by a massive increase in the medium-term future.

~~~
Accujack
Physical space is almost never a constraint in data centers. It's power and
cooling that are almost always the limit.

If AMD's chips offer better performance/watt, that would make them attractive.
The capital cost of purchasing a server tends to be a smaller number than the
cost of the power to run and cool it over its lifetime.

However, what also matters is vendor support. Lots of companies have contracts
for pricing and support on servers, and they won't necessarily change to save
even a large amount of money on one generation of hardware. So for adoption of
Zen2 CPUs in the data center, it will be critical for AMD to get the big names
on board.

~~~
ken47
Big names like Cray, Google, AWS, and Microsoft are _already_ on board.

The next generation of the Zen chipset has already been designed.

EPYC Rome is likely being priced s.t. Xeon's would have to be sold at a loss
to match $/perf.

~~~
Accujack
"on board" in this case means producing a full line of servers with the AMD
chips, not just being interested in them.

People can't buy interesting ideas, and businesses aren't going to change
system vendors overnight.

~~~
ken47
Wait, what? All of the above companies are basing major products on EPYC Rome.
Have you read the press releases?

------
mbell
This should be interesting to watch. The new Ryzen CPUs are good, but the
desktop market is a rather small portion of the overall CPU market which is
dominated by server and laptop. AMD making inroads in the server space is
where they _may_ actually be able to eat up some meaningful market share. That
said, I wouldn't count the chickens before they've hatched here. AMD did this
once before with opteron in ~2006. For them to have holding power they need to
keep it up for several cycles, only then will the big fish jump ship. I expect
Intel to respond with price cuts, they've been monopolizing the server market
for a decade or so now without real competition so they can charge whatever
they want. At least in theory since Intel owns fabs they should win a price
war.

~~~
ken47
This is different than the Opteron days. Today, AMD's offering is
substantially cheaper than Intel, both on an absolute and performance-adjusted
basis. AMD is now ascending at a time when Intel is plagued by a never-ending
stream of embarrassing security flaws, and the market has grown sick of its
monopolistic exploitation of its customers. Furthermore, AMD has already
designed the next generation chip!

AMD could have clearly charged more for these EPYC Rome chips, but they priced
low for a reason -- to grab as much market share as humanly possible as
quickly as possible, and I believe they will do so.

~~~
mbell
I think you're making the mistake of assuming a static market. Pricing is
often assumed to be based on cost, it's not, at least not only. Intel's prices
are high because they can be, not because their costs are inherently higher.
In fact they should be lower given they operate their own fabs and thus don't
require a built in margin for the outsourced fab. If perf/$ is deemed by the
market to be important, Intel will just cut their prices. Also keep in mind no
one that matters at a market scale, e.g. Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc are
paying these list prices. It's entirely possible Intel is still winning the
perf/$ fight in these contracts.

~~~
ken47
I disagree. If you do some research, you'll learn that the chiplet
architecture employed by EPYC Rome is inherently and substantially cheaper to
manufacture than the monolithic design employed for Xeon.

AMD priced these chips so low because they _know_ Intel is going to fight back
with deep discounts. AMD also knows they can manufacture more cheaply for any
given level of performance.

It shouldn't surprise anyone if AMD is offering prices that Intel would have
to counter by selling Xeon's at a loss.

Furthermore, some orgs do not put a price on security. With Intel's poor
security track record in the recent past, it's no surprise that Google hopped
on the EPYC train.

So at least one of the following two are going to play out over the next year:
1) AMD takes massive server market share. 2) INTC bleeds red to slow the loss
of market share.

------
mroche
Further benchmarks on Phoronix of the 7502/7742:
[https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=28142](https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=28142)

~~~
zwaps
wow, I don't think I have ever seen such a dominant benchmark victory across
the board... for 40% less dollars.

~~~
lettergram
At the end of the Phoronix review, you'll find that performance per dollar is
4x - 8x better with AMD. Assuming Intel slashes prices, I still dont' know if
they can match it.

~~~
tyfon
It also beats Intel on performance / watts according to the last page.

Seems like a slam dunk from AMD.

------
chx
Question: does anyone know whether the current generation of Google TPU uses
PCIe 4.0 already? The POWER9 systems support PCIe 4.0 and last year Google
confirmed they use them. If that TPU is 4.0 already then expect Google to buy
an ungodly amount of these EPYC servers to match them as Intel have absolutely
nothing to match here, not until 2021, next year Ice Lake is only rumored to
ship with 26 cores tops.

------
lettergram
> AMD offers you up to 50 to 100% higher performance while offering at a 40%
> lower price

I expect to see many more AMD based EC2 tiers on AWS

------
tutanchamun
servethehome had an interesting paragraph in their review:

> _We are also not allowed to name because Intel put pressure on the OEM who
> built it to have AMD not disclose this information, despite said OEM having
> their logo emblazoned all over the system. Yes, Intel is going to that level
> of competitive pressure on its industry partners ahead of AMD’s launch._

[https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7002-series-rome-
deliv...](https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7002-series-rome-delivers-a-
knockout/9/)

~~~
tomp
Can you expand on this a bit? Who is disallowing whom to not name what? From
my first reading of your comment, it seems like Intel is pushing partners to
not disclose their relationship with AMD? Is that not, like, almost cartel-
like behavior?

~~~
tutanchamun
It's probably best to ask servethehome since I've also understood it that way
when first reading it but on a second read I'm not sure. The wording also
reads to me as if they forgot a word or two (but maybe that's because I'm not
a native speaker).

Here is the entire section:

> _We are going to present a few data points in a min / max. The minimum is
> system idle. Maximum is maximum observed through testing for the system. AMD
> specifically asked us not to use power consumption from the 2P test server
> with pre-production fan control firmware we used for our testing. We are
> also not allowed to name because Intel put pressure on the OEM who built it
> to have AMD not disclose this information, despite said OEM having their
> logo emblazoned all over the system. Yes, Intel is going to that level of
> competitive pressure on its industry partners ahead of AMD’s launch._

------
myrandomcomment
The build team has already started to look for a 1RU, 2 server blade, 2 cores
each server to buy to test our workload on it. Space and power vs. test and
build throughput wins all battles. Great job AMD. Me personally, I just want
to know if it can handle Civ6 with huge map and 18 AI players. It’s the little
things..

~~~
mastax
Civ AI is still single-threaded so the 9900k and 9700k are the reigning
champions. Zen 2 brought AMD close to parity though.

~~~
myrandomcomment
Is there any benefit to multicore on Civ6 at all?

------
zepearl
Were Spectre/Meltdown/etc... remediations active while benchmarking?

~~~
Symmetry
I didn't see it called out in the article but other articles have mentioned
applying them and I assume that's standard practice at AnandTech.

------
marmaduke
> OEMs were also reluctant to partner with the company without a proven
> product.

I'm a little puzzled by this; we've been able to buy Ryzen and Epyc stuff from
Dell in our university for a while. The biggest problem has been the nvme
ssds..

~~~
nolok
Lenovo is all over Ryzen since Zen+ too.

------
ksec
As with all the comment, this really is EPYC. And we have a roadmap of Zen 3
and Zen 4 in the next two years. Zen 3 will likely be some enhancement of Zen
2 with 7nm EUV, Zen 4 will be DDR _5_ , PCIe _5_.0 and _5_ nm ,likely some
more IPC improvement and I/O Die improvement.

The way I see it is that CPU performance for most of my needs has reached the
tipping point. Unless something unexpected happen the performance per dollar
in the next few years are only going to increase. I would not be surprised to
see 128 Core / 256 Threads in Single Socket by 2021 / 2022.

The question I have in my head now, when will DRAM price drop to the point,
where I have 64 Core EPYC Server with 4TB of Memory and call it a day. While
there are some insanely large dataset, for possibly 90% of the Web DB I doubt
we have a Database that is 4TB large. And it could all be in Memory. But even
at $10 /GB, which is very low already for a 256GB DIMM Stick, 4TB is like $40K

------
tempguy9999
Can anyone explain this?

> ...first generation of EPYC, ... attaching each one to two memory channels,
> resulting in a non-uniform memory architecutre (NUMA).

OK

> 2nd Gen EPYC, ... solved this. The CPU design implements a central I/O hub
> through which all communications off-chip occur.

Well it's solved in that all mem accesses now uniformly are a bit slower as
_all_ have to go through the new memory access hub. Is this a correct reading?

also

> The CCDs consist of two four-core Core CompleXes (1 CCD = 2 CCX). ... those
> CCX can only communicate with each other over the central I/O die. There is
> no inter-chiplet CCD communication.

What is the communication for, presumably the MESI (or whatever AMD uses)
cache coherence stuff, and poss. the sync instructions (CAS, atomic increment)
too? Anything else I'm missing?

Thanks

(edit: bloody love that you can click the 'Print This Article' button and it
becomes a single long web page. Webbyness as god intended).

~~~
dragontamer
> Well it's solved in that all mem accesses now uniformly are a bit slower as
> all have to go through the new memory access hub. Is this a correct reading?

Yes. But the new EPYC chips have doubled their L3 cache, and that new memory-
access hub has stupidly high bandwidth.

The larger L3 cache mitigates the latency problems, while the memory-access
hub has more than enough memory-bandwidth to feed all the cores.

------
dman
I wish I had not built an Epyc based workstation last year. This looks like a
spectacular release.

~~~
sangnoir
If you had waited until now, then next year you'd be saying exactly the same
thing when AMD announces the next iteration.

------
alkonaut
That AMD prices this aggressively to me indicates that they expect intel to
slash prices hard too. If the graphics card releases is anything to go by, AMD
might even cut further after intel shows its hand. I know intel have good
margins for server parts but it’s also their bread & butter - what would it
mean to intel’s bottom line if they had to cut prices (not just to select
whales but msrp) by enough to compete here, say 40%?

------
AgentOrange1234
I don’t understand the spec2006 results. In the first table, what are the
units? In the second table, are positive or negative percentages good?

~~~
opencl
SPEC has a reference machine that they ran the benchmark on, the numbers given
are (reference machine runtime)/(tested machine runtime). So bigger numbers
mean it ran faster, positive percentages are good.

------
close04
> Due to bad luck and timing issues we have not been able to test the latest
> Intel and AMD servers CPU in our most demanding workloads

AT just can't catch a break. Any reviews out there that tested heavy
workloads? These are the interesting ones on a CPU like this one.

------
privateSFacct
The thing is you can't even get Ryzen inside a Dell or Lenovo machine - so for
businesses it's kind of hard to get onboard with they hype. So intel is going
to keep up market share until AMD can get into some prebuilt systems.

~~~
adtac
In laptops, you can. Lenovo launched the T495 and T495s a couple of months
ago. AMD being a part of the venerable T-series is a huge testament to their
come back.

Not sure about desktops.

~~~
puzzlingcaptcha
It's also available at lower price points. Typing from E495 which set me back
like 600 EUR.

