AMD EPYC 7773X "Milan-X" Benchmarks Show Very Strong HPC Performance Upgrade
EPYC 7773X was successfully extending AMD's lead even further over the Intel Xeon Ice Lake competition across the range of relevant HPC workloads carried out. Considering the Milan-X parts only costing marginally more than Milan and the Xeon Platinum 8380 commonly selling at retail for more than $9k USD, the EPYC 7773X offers not only great performance but matched by great value too.
The EPYC 7773X 1P power consumption was about 28 Watts higher than the EPYC 7763 on average while both had a maximum package power consumption of 286~290 Watts as reported via the Linux RAPL/PowerCap interfaces. The EPYC 7773X 1P CPU power consumption on average was about 5 Watts less than the Xeon Platinum 8380. With the EPYC 7773X 2P configuration, the CPU package power consumption combined was on average 11 Watts higher than the EPYC 77763 2P and about 40 Watts less than the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P on average.
Prior to the EPYC 7773X testing or Milan-X testing in the cloud, AMD 3D V-Cache sounded very interesting from a technical perspective but unclear how well it would map in the real-world to performance given AMD had only publicly cited a few select workloads of popular commercial applications. After testing, it's great to see a fairly wide range of HPC workloads benefiting from this large L3 cache -- including our tests with mostly open-source workloads that have seen no direct tuning yet for large L3 cache usage. For high performance computing workloads able to make use of AMD 3D V-Cache, the EPYC 7773X offered generational-sized (or greater) gains for this mid-cycle product that works with existing platforms and within the same power range of existing processors. It will also be very interesting to see how the software ecosystem evolves for AMD 3D V-Cache and the expected Xeon Sapphire Rapids CPUs with on-package HBM for better embracing processors with big caches.
If still left wondering about particular workloads benefiting or not from AMD 3D V-Cache with the current state of software, Microsoft is already offering Azure HBv3 instances with Milan-X upgrades. See the launch-day Microsoft Azure HBv3 Milan-X benchmarks and you can easily try it out yourself with low costs for exploring the benefits of up to a 1.5GB L3 cache. Thanks again to AMD for providing the EPYC review samples.
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