The Linux Performance For AMD Rome vs. Intel Cascade Lake One Year After Launch

Cryptography areas at least when not running many crypto tasks concurrently is one of the areas where the Cascade Lake performance has been ahead of Rome. With the latest Linux software stack it's still that way at least for the crypto++ benchmark, but the AMD performance has improved slightly: about 4% faster compared to a year ago for keyed algorithms while the unkeyed algorithms were just under 2%.

BLAKE2 is another cryptography benchmark where AMD EPYC saw nice improvements on the latest Ubuntu and kernel + GCC compared to the Ubuntu 19.04 state. The Cascade Lake performance was unchanged while the software improvements benefited Rome almost to the point of closing the gap with Cascade Lake.

For the CP2K molecular dynamics package, both servers were slightly behind their performance on Ubuntu 19.04.

Similarly, the latest open-source software packages yielded slightly lower performance for NAMD on both servers though the hit taken was very small.

When looking at the MrBayes bayesian analysis benchmark, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 dual socket server took quite a noticeable performance hit while the AMD EPYC Rome performance improved. The hit seen on the Intel Cascade Lake server was enough to now put the performance behind the AMD EPYC 7742 2P -- both for the software state last year and obviously more so with the better optimized AMD performance this year.