AMD Claims World’s Fastest Per-Core Performance with New EPYC Rome 7Fx2 CPUs

[harlan4096]

Dial up the clocks, cache, and TDP

Intel recently resigned itself to engaging in a price war with AMD's EPYC processors as it slashed gen-on-gen pricing for its Cascade Lake Refresh processors. Now AMD is taking the battle in an entirely different direction as it unveils three new workload-optimized processors that strike at the heart of the mid-range market, but with higher pricing than the preceding models.

AMD says the new 7Fx2 frequency-optimized processors offer the world's fastest per-core performance from x86 server CPUs as the company looks to upset Intel's traditional leadership position in per-core performance. The boosted performance comes as a byproduct of an increased base frequency of 500 MHz paired with a healthy dollop of extra L3 cache that benefits workloads that benefit from keeping data close to the execution cores, like relational databases, high performance computing (HPC), and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) applications.

The tradeoff comes in the form of a higher TDP rating, meaning the processors consume more power and generate more heat, along with the higher pricing that comes as a result of the premium-binned silicon. However, the three new EPYC Rome 7Fx2 processors offset those metrics with much higher performance, thus enabling denser solutions. AMD says that combination leads to reduced up-front costs and a 50% reduction in total operating costs (TCO) for the target markets, thus justifying the higher price points.

AMD continues to nibble away at Intel's data center market share and says that it is on track to reach mid-double-digit share by the second quarter of this year. The new 7Fx2-series processors look to broaden that attack into applications where Intel has traditionally held the advantage. Let's take a closer look.

AMD EPYC Rome 7F32, 7F52, and 7F72 Processors

The new processors come in 8-, 16-, and 24-core flavors that wield notable increases in both base and boost frequencies. They still come with the same 7nm process and Zen 2 microarchitecture found on other EPYC Rome processors, but AMD says its targeted refinements equate to a sizeable performance advantage over preceding models. AMD provided estimated SPEC2017_int_base benchmarks that show a sizeable increase in both performance-per-core and performance-per-dollar in the lightly-threaded workloads that have long been one of Intel Xeon's strongest selling points, particularly for software that is licensed on a per-core basis. These types of applications command high premiums that increase based upon the number of active cores, so per-core performance is paramount.

As with all vendor-supplied benchmarks, not to mention estimations, take these with a grain of salt. However, we do have processors in for testing, and these benchmarks coincide with our basic expectations for the improved specifications. AMD also has the advantage of more memory channels (eight vs. Intel's six) and faster supported memory speeds (DDR4-3200 vs. Intel's DDR4-2933). Couple that with a higher 4TB memory capacity (Intel tops out at 2TB without additional fees) and 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0 (Intel has 48 lanes of PCIe 3.0), and AMD has a compelling performance story.
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