AMD launched the Zen 2 based Epyc Rome chips at Computex 2019 offering more than double the performance compared to the competing Intel Xeon processors. Sure, team blue termed it as a hoax and compared the new AMD server CPU to their 56 Core Cascade Lake-AP flagship, but the deltas still weren’t enough to justify the 4-5 times higher price. The Epyc Rome SKUs top out at $10,000 with 64 cores and a fat L3 cache. The Intel chips on the other hand are mostly concentrated in the 18-28 core bracket while costing twice as much while the 56 core behemoth is going to cost in the $40-50K range or maybe even more.
The AMD flagship scores an insane 1565GOPS in the processor arithmetic test, gaining the absolute top spot in the processor database (processor arithmetic). I believe this is the first of many such achievements for team red and we hope to see better results with the upcoming Milan CPUs based on the Zen 3 7nm+ design in the coming years. If you look at the top 10 contestants in the SiSoft Database, you’ll see multi-socket systems powered by 2-4 Intel Xeon Platinum parts (24-28 cores each) and not even two of those in parallel are able to beat the Epyc flagship.
The AMD Epyc “Rome” processor features 64 cores and 128 threads running at a base and boost of 1.5Ghz and 3.3Ghz, respectively. It packs a whopping 256 MB of L3 cache and 32 MB of L2. This is again twice as much compared to the more expensive Xeon Platinum SKUs. Should help AMD take Intel down by a few notches in the lucrative server space, and force them to innovate after all these years of stagnation.
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