AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" Linux Benchmarks - Superb Performance

For the AMD EPYC Milan launch-day benchmarking, the tests were conducted under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and running Linux 5.11. While Linux 5.11 is not required, it was used for having the very latest upstream patches and also being able to monitor the CPU package power consumption using the amd_energy Linux driver. This same software stack was used across all of the server processors tested. Each CPU under test was running with memory rated for its maximum number of memory channels populated and maximum supported DDR4 memory frequency.

AMD's Daytona server with upgraded BIOS/firmware has been working out great for Milan as a drop-in upgrade though due to BIOS size limitations does mean afterwards losing immediate backwards compatibility with Rome unless downgrading the BIOS and BMC firmware. The fresh Intel Xeon re-testing happened from the Gigabyte S451-3R0 storage server that continues working out great and again was tested on Linux 5.11 + Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with a 16 x 32GB DDR4-2933 configuration. The same Micron 9300 series 3.8TB NVMe solid-state drive was also used across all the test systems.

The P-State/CPUFreq performance governor was also set to the "performance" mode for all of the processors tested. The processors tested for launch day included:

- EPYC 7601 2P
- EPYC 7532
- EPYC 7542
- EPYC 7552
- EPYC 7642
- EPYC 7662
- EPYC 7702
- EPYC 7742
- EPYC 7742 2P
- EPYC 7F72 2P
- EPYC 7F52
- EPYC 7F52 2P
- EPYC 75F3
- EPYC 75F3 2P
- EPYC 7713
- EPYC 7713 2P
- EPYC 7763
- EPYC 7763 2P
- Xeon Gold 6258R
- Xeon Gold 5220R
- Xeon Gold 5220R 2P
- Xeon Platinum 8280
- Xeon Platinum 8280 2P

For those interested in ARMv8 server Ampere Altra performance against EPYC Milan, there are some numbers later in the article that was a separate run due to the differences in ARMv8-friendly tests.

Before getting to all the individual benchmark results, first up is a look at just the EPYC 7601 2P Naples against EPYC 7742 2P Rome against EPYC 7763 2P Milan joined by the EPYC 7713 2P Milan, EPYC 75F3 2P Milan, EPYC 7F52 2P Rome, and Xeon Platinum 8280 2P Cascade Lake processors for the high-end look. As more than one hundred benchmarks were carried out, for the quick and easy breakdown is grouping the results by logical area / suite and generating the geometric mean. (All of the raw individual benchmarks follow in this article.)