Ubuntu 20.04 + Linux 5.5: Fresh Benchmarks Of AMD EPYC Rome vs. Intel Xeon Cascade Lake

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 13 February 2020 at 11:19 AM EST. Page 1 of 9. 17 Comments.

Here are some fresh numbers looking at the current performance of various AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors up against Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors when using an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development snapshot and also upgrading to Linux 5.5 as the latest stable kernel. Beyond raw performance, power efficiency and performance-per-dollar for these different server CPUs are being compared as well for these sub-$5000 processors.

Ahead of the Ubuntu 20.04 long-term support release this spring and being curious how the latest AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon CPUs are competing with a bleeding-edge software stack also including Linux 5.5, this fresh benchmark comparison was performed. The single-socket tests carried out for this article included the:

- AMD EPYC 7302
- AMD EPYC 7402
- AMD EPYC 7502
- AMD EPYC 7642
- Intel Xeon Silver 4216
- Intel Xeon Gold 5218
- Intel Xeon Platinum 8253

The comparison was limited to the EPYC / Xeon CPUs we had available that are of a retail price of $5000 USD or less. It's also the first time we are looking at some of those Xeon Cascade Lake parts in this comparison. All systems were tested with the same 8 x 16GB DDR4-3200 Crucial ECC Registered memory and 3.8TB Micron 9300 NVMe solid-state drive. On the AMD EPYC side was the ASRockRack EPYCD8 motherboard and on the Intel side was the Supermicro X11SPL-F motherboard. Both systems were running their latest BIOS and that paired with the latest software stack of Ubuntu 20.04 + Linux 5.5 with all default mitigations on each platform.

The overall AC system power consumption was being monitored in real-time using a WattsUp Pro power meter. The performance-per-dollar on the benchmarks were also calculated using the current retail pricing for these various EPYC and Xeon CPUs as of testing time.

All of these benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite for our first Xeon vs. EPYC comparison of 2020 on the latest open-source Linux software.


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