AMD EPYC 7003 Series Performance In The Cloud With Microsoft Azure HBv3 HPC VMs

One of the areas where the Azure HC virtual machine with Xeon Scalable was competitive to the EPYC 7V13 or even taking a few wins was oneDNN, Intel's neural network library that is able to make efficient use of AVX-512. The oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library can be used by PyTorch and an increasing number of other deep learning software packages.

PlaidML is another deep learning framework that has enjoyed much optimizations and other work by Intel's open-source developers.

While the HC VM was good for raw performance with PlaidML, when it comes to performance-per-dollar the cheaper Azure HBv3 120 core VM leads.

In other AI / deep learning workloads, the EPYC 7V13 tended to lead and offer up competitive performance to the Intel-powered Azure HC.