AMD Makes A Compelling Case For Budget-Friendly Ryzen Dedicated Servers

The AMD Ryzen 5000 series offered great performance against the current Xeon E-2200/2300 series processors under a variety of workloads from code compilation to CPU-based renderers to various other workloads commonly running on dedicated servers. The Xeon E-2300 advantages primarily came down to its strong single-threaded performance without any background tasks that would prevent the CPU from reaching its top boost frequency. Lightly loaded database servers in particular were one area with a strong showing or if sequentially running a lot of Python and PHP scripts, for example. The Xeon E-2300 is at a significant disadvantage due to only being able to offer up to eight cores / sixteen threads compared to up to 16 cores / 32 threads with Ryzen. Even the AMD Ryzen 3000 series held up strong, especially for cases like code compilation if wanting to assemble a budget-minded CI/CD setup or other build boxes.

The geometric mean results (again) of all the benchmark results conducted, if you skipped over some pages...

Even with the higher core counts, AMD Ryzen is priced competitive against the Xeon E-2300 series parts. The top-end Xeon E-2388G has a recommended customer price of $578 USD (though I can't find it in stock at any major Internet retailer) while the Ryzen 9 5950X with twice the number of cores comes in at $580~590 currently priced and in-stock at various Internet retailers. Going further down the stack, AMD Ryzen 3000/5000 series is priced similarly or better than the rest of the Xeon E-2300 line-up.

Aside from the physical CPU cost, public cloud service providers appear to be pricing their Ryzen dedicated servers well. ServeTheWorld 's Ryzen 9 5950X and Xeon E-2388G servers with 64GB of DDR4 memory and dual 960GB SSDs are both priced the same -- starting out at 1757 NOK (~$199 USD) per month. Or down the stack there is the prior generation Xeon E-2278G server starting at 1142 NOK per month (~$129 USD) to the Ryzen 5 5600X at 1268 NOK per month (~$144). The Ryzen 5 5600X server is 11% more but 34% faster than the E-2278G based on the overall geometric mean. Given the rather sizable performance difference in many of the benchmarks, this does translate into rather nice value for those looking to maximize the cost effectiveness of their low-end dedicated server purchases depending upon how competitively priced the AMD servers are at various dedicated hosting providers around the world.

The average CPU power consumption of the higher-end Ryzen parts was higher than the Xeon E-2388G, but the peak CPU power consumption was consistently seen on the Xeon E Rocket Lake processors.

On a performance-per-Watt basis, the AMD Ryzen processors were competing very well against the Intel server competition.

Even in test cases like MariaDB where Intel was picking up wins, AMD Ryzen was able to deliver better CPU power efficiency.

That's where things stand for the current generation Xeon E processors up against the AMD Ryzen processors that are increasingly finding use within budget dedicated servers. It will be interesting to see how the situation plays out when Intel introduces Xeon E processors based on Alder Lake for allowing higher core counts due to the hybrid design, so at least there should be higher core/thread counts to compete with the Ryzen processors. But depending upon timing the next-generation Xeon E processors could arrive close to AMD introducing their next-generation "Zen 4" processors, which could heat up the race even more. In any event it's great to have this healthy competition and AMD coming out with a compelling case for AMD Ryzen within lower-cost dedicated servers. At least from the ASRock Rack testing of the past few weeks, they have been working out well with the Ryzen 5000 series for ECC memory and BMC support. It will be interesting to see what next-generation AMD Ryzen server-focused motherboards bring for further competing in this space among low-cost hosting providers.

Outside of the performance and supporting features like ECC memory and BMC/IPMI functionality, one area that AMD nor Intel hold a advantage on -- or in part on the server motherboard vendors -- would be around open-source firmware support for retail-available motherboards. As many Phoronix readers will surely agree, it would be wonderful if there were actual latest-generation low-end/budget server motherboards available with open firmware such as with Coreboot and no/minimal binary blobs and/or embracing the likes of LinuxBoot and other open-source firmware options for maximizing transparency/security and all of the innovative feature work happening on those fronts. Sadly, old AMD Opteron motherboards remain popular among such open-source enthusiasts for their completely free/open-source firmware or going the route of Raptor Computing with IBM POWER9 for fully open-source servers or the hyperscalers that have more pull and engineering resources to work out their own solutions.

Thanks to ServeTheWorld, with its Norwegian data center, allowing for all of the free remote access for carrying out all of these Xeon E 2200/2300 series and Ryzen benchmarks. (Pictured: Phoronix Oslo Meet-Up 2011)

Thanks to AMD for providing the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-X570/2L2T loaner server for carrying out my local testing and thanks to ServeTheWorld for providing the gratis access to their different Xeon E and AMD Ryzen servers over the past few weeks for carrying out this remote testing for seeing how these processors perform in the data center. More information on the Norwegian hosting provider's different server options can be found at ServeTheWorld.net. AMD has also launched a dedicated solutions page around AMD Ryzen for dedicated hosting with more information and the option of requesting a demo server. Coming up next week will be some benchmarks looking at the AMD ASRock Rack server across Windows and various Linux distributions.