Running The AMD EPYC 9754 CPUs With A 320W cTDP To Enhance Power Efficiency

Long story short, having the ability to lower the TDP to 320 Watts ended up delivering similar performance across a range of workloads while slightly reducing the CPU power consumption. In practice with the workloads tested it wasn't a 40 Watts savings per CPU but in most cases tended to be in the 10~20 Watt range based on the recorded RAPL/PowerCap.

When taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks, the EPYC 9754 2P at 320 Watts was running at around 99% the performance of the default 360 Watt configuration. Not bad when the power consumption was lower by up to about 5% while in other workloads was less than that but still the minimal performance difference was making this option a win. For those looking to maximize the power efficiency of their servers, leveraging the 320W cTDP is something worth considering. Even at the default TDPs though, the EPYC 9754 2P easily flies past the Xeon Platinum 8490H Sapphire Rapids performance and power efficiency. Especially with a fleet of dozens to hundreds or even thousands of these processors in CSP data centers, this ability to easily customize the cTDP can prove useful for ensuring optimal efficiency. On the opposite side, those wishing to really make the most of their hardware can switch determinism modes and run at a 400 Watt TDP. In that case with a 400W TDP the EPYC 9754 2P performance was up by about 6% while the power increase was up by about 10%. In any event just drawing attention to the cTDP options provided by AMD for the EPYC processors for those wishing to fine-tune their servers for maximum performance or otherwise squeeze out the maximum possible performance.