AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" Linux Benchmarks - Superb Performance

The CPU power consumption was coming in line with the TDP rating on the respective processors. The absolute peak / maximum in some cases did strike over the TDP rating but that was a rarity as showed by these results. The average power consumption was with the mix of single and lightly threaded through heavily threaded workloads.

Lastly, in summary is a look at the geometric mean across the 147 benchmarks carried out for today's launch-day review with these freshly tested/re-tested processors. When taking the geometric mean of those nearly 150 data points, the EPYC 7763 2P comes out 23% faster than the EPYC 7742 2P for the mix of single/multi-threaded test cases. From the EPYC 7742 to 7763 was a 14% improvement to performance. Or for the EPYC 7713 2P at the same TDP as the EPYC 7742 was a 17.5% improvement in a 2P configuration and 12% for the 1P configuration. With the EPYC 75F3 the uplift is even more significant but it also has twice the core/thread count of the 7F52. The three tested Milan CPUs in their 1P configuration all came out ahead of Intel's more expensive Xeon Platinum 8280 in its 2P configuration.

AMD's EPYC 7002 series processors have aged incredibly well over the past year and a half given their stellar performance to begin with and then prolonged by Intel having refocused Cooper Lake to 4S/8S servers and Ice Lake Xeon not having formally launched yet. How well Intel Xeon Ice Lake will perform and its pricing/availability are the big questions that remain yet to be answered. However, AMD is in a great position with the EPYC 7003 series offering leading performance that is well above the EPYC 7002 series and even the top-end EPYC 7763 at $7890 USD is priced well below that of the Xeon Platinum 8280 flagship model when it originally launched. It would be very difficult to imagine Ice Lake Xeon processors managing to come out ahead on value compared to Milan. Ice Lake Xeon parts are rumored to top out at 40 cores / 80 threads, to which the EPYC 7003 series will continue to enjoy its lead in core/thread counts.

Also helping Milan in delivering great value is continuing to retain SP3 socket compatibility and platform support should be as simple as a BIOS update, assuming board/system vendors are quick in releasing said updates for Milan. This established platform support should also help in seeing EPYC 7003 more quickly adopted especially compared to after Rome's launch where it took some time in conventional retail channels for independent system builders to see supported motherboards. This established platform support is also helping in even some public cloud providers today launching EPYC 7003 based instances. Microsoft's Azure is making available HPC cloud instances based on Milan today and we'll be delivering some benchmarks on that front soon, another nice milestone compared to the time for past CPU launches before generally seeing them in the public cloud.

The Linux support for the AMD EPYC 7003 series is in good shape across current major Linux distributions and the various enterprise Linux distributions. The one case where you'll want a newer kernel is namely for temperature and energy monitoring for Zen 3 but aside from that the Linux support is in good shape especially with building off the Rome platform. The one frustrating aspect has been the tardiness of the compiler tuning patches which we hope AMD will be working to address as they continue ramping up more Linux resources in light of their growing HPC and data center marketshare.

Those wishing to look through all of the data so far on the EPYC 7003 series as well as more data to come from us and the open-source benchmark community, see all the EPYC 7003 series public data via OpenBenchmarking.org that is beginning to offer a lot of data beginning today.

In the coming days will be benchmarks looking at the EPYC 7003 series performance/support on FreeBSD, other Linux distribution benchmarks, and AMD AOCC 3.0 compiler performance against GCC and Clang, among other tests.