AMD EPYC 7251 Provides Great Value At Less Than $500 USD

First up was the NASA Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) and in EP.C is the embarrassingly parallel run. While the EPYC 7251 is only about ~$40 more (or 10%) more expensive than the Xeon Silver 4108 depending upon Internet retailer, the EPYC 7251 is 43% faster than the comparable eight-core Intel CPU in this highly-threaded test. The Xeon E5 CPUs are understandably faster with the Xeon E5-1680 v3 being a Haswell-era 8 core / 16 thread processor clocked at 3.2GHz / 3.6GHz but with 140 Watt TDP and E5-2687W v3 being a 10 core / 20 thread 3.1GHz / 3.5GHz processor. These older Xeon E5 v3 CPUs are also much more expensive with the E5-1680 v3 still being available from Internet retailers for ~$1100 USD.

Meanwhile with the Lower-Upper Gauss-Seidel solver, the EPYC 7251 was able to easily run past the older Haswell Xeon E5 processors and was more than twice as fast as the Silver 4108 in this extreme case showcasing EPYC's abilities.

While in Parboil's Lattice-Boltzmann Method Fluid Dynamics solver, the EPYC 7251 was slightly faster than the Xeon E3-1680 v5.

With the Distance-Cutoff Coulombic Potential solver, the older E5 Xeon CPUs with their higher clock speeds (and additional cores/threads in the case of the E5-2687Wv3) were slightly better while the EPYC 7251 was still performing better than the Silver 4108.

The EPYC 7251 also performs well in the Rodinia scientific workloads.

With Rodinia's computational fluid dynamics solver, the EPYC 7251 manages again to be much faster than the Xeon Silver 4108 as well as the more expensive and older Xeon E5 v3 CPUs.