AMD EPYC 9965 "Turin Dense" Delivers Better Performance/Power Efficiency vs. AmpereOne 192-Core ARM CPU
There is often much chatter online that likes to imply ARM is inherently more power efficient or similar. But as we've seen in the past from AMD EPYC Bergamo and Intel Xeon 6 Sierra Forest and now AMD EPYC Turin Dense as a shining example, x86_64 can compete and exceed AArch64 processors in raw performance and performance-per-Watt on a per-core basis. In some workloads the AmpereOne A192-32X does a very good job competing or even outperforming the EPYC 9965 but overall those wins were very limited. The AmpereOne A192-32X does maintain a significant pricing difference against the EPYC 9965 as far as list prices are concerned, but we'll see how that plays out in the market place as well as when AmpereOne CPUs finally become readily available via distributors / Internet retailers.
Ampere Computing would have enjoyed much stronger positioning had AmpereOne ramped up one or more years ago, but with the delays in getting to general availability, the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon competition has only grown significantly stronger for those seeking dense/cloud focused deployments. Perhaps AmpereOne M with 12 channel memory will be in better standing while AmpereOne MX with 12 channel DDR5, 3nm manufacturing, and up to 256 cores per socket should be out next year... But with Ampere's long period in finally getting AmpereOne to general availability and independent reviews, I'll hold my excitement until actually seeing AmpreOne MX in hand.
When looking at the CPU power consumption across the large span of benchmarks, the EPYC 9965 had an average power consumption of around 275 Watts to AmpereOne A192-32X at around 230 Watts. The peak power difference was 401 Watts for the AmpereOne A192-32X to 461 Watts with the EPYC 9965. The big disappointment on the AmpereOne side for power consumption is the significantly higher idle/low-load power use. The AmpereOne A192-32X bottomed out at 101 Watts during the idle periods while the EPYC 9965 went as low as 19 Watts. The high idle power use has been noted in prior AmpereOne articles on Phoronix with the CPU unfortunately not going below 100 Watts.
On a geo mean basis across all the benchmarks, the 192-core EPYC 9965 was delivering 1.6x the performance of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship processor in the benchmarks conducted. So while the average power use of the EPYC 9965 was around 1.2x that of the AmpereOne A192-32X, it more than makes up for it in power efficiency with 1.6x the performance.
As seen with this EPYC 9965 to AmpereOne A192-32X comparison, AMD EPYC Turin Dense CPUs can easily compete with and typically outperform AmpereOne AArch64 cores. And ultimately delivering better performance-per-Watt. The one area where Ampere Computing may have the advantage is on performance-per-dollar if the list pricing for both AMD EPYC Turin and AmpereOne are accurate and there becomes robust availability. That's for CPU pricing at least with not yet having any public AmpereOne server platform pricing for getting an idea of the overall TCO.
Another initial challenge with AmpereOne either due to the CPU itself or the Supermicro server is never being able to idle under 100 Watt power draw for the CPU... The AMD EPYC 9965 at idle could reach as little as 19 Watts, similar to other modern AMD and Intel CPUs or even Ampere Altra would idle much less than what I saw with the AmpereOne A192-32X during the testing last month.
AmpereOne would have been much more competitive had it shipped a year ago as was previously planned by Ampere Computing, or even earlier this year, but instead it's only now seeing increasing availability in late 2024. Now with the AMD EPYC Turin Dense launch with Zen 5C cores we are seeing very compelling performance and power efficiency upgrades while being able to deliver 192 x86_64 cores per socket (and 384 threads in total with SMT), 12 channel DDR5-6000/6400 memory, and administrators/developers being able to rely on x86_64 without having to worry whether their software is properly optimized for AArch64. Turin Dense dispels the myth that x86_64 can't be as power efficient as ARM or having cores as a small. The AMD EPYC 9005 series is delivering robust and leading performance across the board whether you are concerned most about server density or with the Turin classic Zen 5 cores going after peak HPC/server performance.
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