NVIDIA GH200 72 Core Grace CPU Performance vs. AMD Ryzen Threadripper Workstations
Earlier this month I posted some initial CPU benchmarks of the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper up against AMD EPYC Zen 4 and Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids processors. That was a very interesting battle and showed the interesting capabilities of the 72 Arm Neoverse-V2 cores. With this GPTshop.ai GH200 system actually being in workstation form, I also ran some additional benchmarks looking at the CPU capabilities of the GH200 compared to AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series workstations.
GPTshop.ai that provided the remote access to the GH200 576GB advertises their creation as a "ultimate high-end desktop supercomputer for AI and HPC" rather than being a conventional GH200 rackmounted server deployment. Due to being a desktop/workstation focus in a tower chassis, I decided it would also be interesting to see how the GH200 CPU performance compares to that of the latest AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstations/desktops running Linux. For this round of testing the NVIDIA GH200 CPU/system performance was compared to the HP Z6 G5 A workstation as well as the System76 Thelio Major, being the two Threadripper workstation systems I have around. (Unfortunately I have no similar Xeon W hardware around the lab thus just the Threadripper comparison for this article.)
The previously-reviewed HP Z6 G5 A workstation was configured with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX 96-core / 192-thread Zen 4 processor, 8 x 16GB DDR5-5200 memory, NVIDIA RTX A4000, and is all around a nice high-end AMD workstation. (Unfortunately this system needs to be sent back soon so this article will be the last of the PRO 7995WX benchmarking at Phoronix.)
The other Threadripper workstation for testing is the System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X as the top-end non-PRO SKU. The Threadripper 7980X 64-core / 128-thread processor was equipped with 4 x 32GB DDR5-4800 memory and Radeon PRO W7900 graphics.
The HP Z6 G5 A, System76 Thelio Major r5, and GPTshop.ai GH200 576GB were all freshly tested with Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.5 kernel, the performance CPU frequency scaling governor, GCC 13.2, and other defaults for this latest Ubuntu release.
All the CPUs were running at stock speeds. The high Threadripper frequencies reported is a known AMD P-State bug AMD is working to fix.
As with the prior GH200 benchmarking article of the seventy-two Neoverse-V2 CPU cores with Grace, the current tests are just looking at the processor/system performance. I'm waiting on remote access again to the GH200 for running the GPU-accelerated portion of the tests so this article is intended at looking at how the Grace CPU compares to the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X and PRO 7995WX x86_64 Linux workstations for various workloads. As noted in the prior article, no CPU power consumption numbers unfortunately due to no RAPL/PowerCap driver or similar exposure of just the CPU power consumption data currently under Linux for the GH200.