AMD 4th Gen EPYC 9654 "Genoa" AVX-512 Performance Analysis

AVX-512 was also of benefit in other areas written to make use of the extensions like with simdjson for very high performance JSON parsing.

Genoa's AVX-512 presence was also very beneficial for the OpenFOAM 10 computational fluid dynamics software.

The CP2K molecular dynamics software enjoyed marginally improved performance with AVX-512.

More than 130 benchmarks in full were run for this AVX-512 comparison on AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" with the flagship EPYC 9654 processors.

Over that wide span of AVX-512-capable benchmarks, Zen 4's AVX-512 implementation led to a 35% increase in performance overall. But as shown from the wide range of workloads tested, the benefits of AVX-512 can vary quite a bit from small gains in areas like faster JSON parsing with simdjson to massive performance improvements with various AI / deep learning software like TensorFlow, OpenVINO, and others. Many Intel oneAPI rendering toolkit components optimized for AVX-512 also benefited greatly from AVX-512 on AMD Genoa processors.

The good news is that even with the massive performance gains from utilizing AVX-512, there was no significant difference in the EPYC 9654 2P power consumption. One interesting characteristic is that when AVX-512 was enabled, in the brief moments of idle between test runs or between different benchmarks, the CPU power consumption was able to hit a lower power state than when AVX-512 was forced off. And in some light workloads the AVX-512 usage also showed lower power use than without AVX-512.

Unlike early generations of AVX-512 enabled Intel CPUs, the EPYC 9654 CPU temperature didn't experience elevated temperatures when running all these AVX-512-capable workloads nor was there the CPU frequency impairment.

So like with the AVX-512 findings previously published for AMD Ryzen 7000 series, the AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" AVX-512 results are stellar and part of the reason for the terrific generational uplift from AMD EPYC 7003 Milan(X) and the very strong showing against current Intel Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors. Benchmarks looking at other areas of the EPYC Genoa performance under Linux continue to be worked on at Phoronix.