AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Make For Compelling Budget Servers, Leading Performance & Value Over Xeon E

I've been testing with the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T for several weeks now and this platform has worked out very well for assembling a 1U AMD Ryzen AM5 server.

The connectivity options with the 1U4LW-B650/2L2T are great, the ASRock Rack IPMI functionality works out well and doesn't require any extra purchases (though we'd really love to see an option for OpenBMC...), the combined four 1GbE and 10GbE network interfaces are more than enough for most purposes, and the DDR5 ECC UDIMM support worked out fine with all of the Ryzen 7000 series processors I tested. My only nit-pick with this particular platform would have been seeing 2.5-inch NVMe SSD drive support to augment or replace the four SATA 3.5-inch drive bays, but in any event there are other AM5 server platforms available for those desiring 2.5-inch NVMe SSD drive support. For my purposes with using a 2.5-inch NVMe SSD for the benchmarking process was using an adapter within the PCIe x16 slot. The motherboard also has a PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot on the motherboard.

When it comes to the Intel competition in the budget friendly server space, there isn't really a great competitor at this point to the Ryzen 7000 series. The closest ends up being the Xeon E-2300 series Rocket Lake processors for similar core counts and having ECC memory support. While there are some server-type motherboards for Alder Lake / Rocket Lake processors, there you do not have ECC memory support and are running a mix of P and E cores that can cause issues for some server workloads. Intel has been improving the scheduling behavior of hybrid CPUs under Linux and making various enhancements, but still especially with the lack of ECC support on the Intel Core CPUs, basically leaves the Xeon E-2300 series as the most relevant competition.

At the top-end of the Xeon E-2300 series stack is the Xeon E-2388G with 8 cores / 16 threads that has been available now for two years while still commanding a price tag above $600 USD. The Xeon Rocket Lake flagship has a 3.2GHz base frequency and 5.1GHz maximum turbo frequency with a 95 Watt TDP. The Rocket Lake CPUs do have AVX-512 support and support up to 128GB of DDR4-3200 memory with ECC memory being supported.

Meanwhile at the top-end of the Ryzen 7000 series stack is the Ryzen 9 7950X for 16 cores / 32 threads, 4.5GHz base clock, and a boost clock up to 5.7GHz. While the Xeon E-2388G continues to retail for above $600 USD, the Ryzen 9 7950X can be found for $536~599 USD. Or if wanting to compare 8 core options, the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X with 8 cores / 16 threads retails for around half the price of the Xeon E-2388G at $314 USD while having a similar TDP, 4.5GHz base frequency, and 5.4GHz maximum boost clock.

For getting an idea of the Ryzen 7000 series Linux performance in a wide range of server workloads, the following processors were benchmarked -- including the prior generation Ryzen 5000 series processors as well as two Xeon E-2300 series processors based on what I had available/access to testing:

- Ryzen 5 7600
- Ryzen 5 7600X
- Ryzen 7 7700
- Ryzen 7 7700X
- Ryzen 7 7800X3D
- Ryzen 9 7900
- Ryzen 9 7900X
- Ryzen 9 7900X3D
- Ryzen 9 7950X
- Ryzen 9 7950X3D
- Ryzen 5 5500
- Ryzen 5 5600G
- Ryzen 5 5600X
- Ryzen 7 5800X
- Ryzen 7 5800X3D
- Ryzen 9 5900X
- Ryzen 9 5950X
- Xeon E-2388G
- Xeon E-2336

All of the testing took place under Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with the Linux 5.19 kernel and default GCC 11.3 compiler. A Micron 7450 Max 3.2TB NVMe solid-state drive was used for all testing. The AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors were tested with the 1U4LW-B650/2L2T and using 2 x 32GB of Micron DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMM memory. The Intel Xeon E Rocket Lake processors were tested with the ASRockRack E3C252D4U and using 2 x 32GB Micron DDR4-3200 ECC UDIMM memory.

A wide variety of workloads were tested across this large assortment of processors while also monitoring the CPU power consumption during the testing process using the exposed RAPL/PowerCap interfaces.