Intel Xeon vs AMD EPYC

I was curious of how performant is the new AMD EPYC processor and did two practical tests:

  • building of the linux kernel as a test of multi-core performance
  • bzipping of a 10Gb file as a test of single-core performance.

Test systems:

The both systems are equipped with SSD drives.

Here are the results:

|---------------------------------------------------------+-------+-------------------+----------------|
| CPU                                                     | Cores | Kernel build time | 10GB bzip time |
|---------------------------------------------------------+-------+-------------------+----------------|
| AMD EPYC 7401P 24-Core Processor (SMT on)               |    48 | 5m43s             | 1m54s          |
| AMD EPYC 7401P 24-Core Processor (SMT off)              |    24 | 6m53s             | 1m54s          |
|                                                         |       |                   |                |
| 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz (SMT on)  |    48 | 5m47s             | 1m46s          |
| 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz (SMT off) |    24 | 6m58s             | 1m43s          |
|---------------------------------------------------------+-------+-------------------+----------------|

The two systems are very close in terms of multi-core and single-core performance.

AMD EPYC 7401P costs almost the same as a single Intel Xeon E5-2650, but performs as two Intel processors.

As we can see, AMD EPYC is the clean winner in terms of performance per cpu cost.

Performance tests of other processors can be found at github.com/gtrafimenkov/cloud-servers-performance.