AMD's EPYC Milan Breaks Cinebench Record, Here's a 10nm Ice Lake Xeon Comparison

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amds-epyc-milan-breaks-cinebench-record-heres-a-10nm-ice-lake-xeon-comparison

by ItsTotallyOn • 5 years ago

105 63 5 years ago

walrus013• 5 years ago

Cooling: "Liquid Nitrogen" reminds me of the amazing day when somebody first overclocked a slot based AMD Athlon to 1.0 GHz using a custom refrigerant loop system.

FuckButtons2• 5 years ago

Cooling with Liquid nitrogen is in some ways simpler than a refrigerator cycle since it’s completely impractical to compress & recondense it. A cryogenic cooling system usually just vents the gas into the room, it may just be a little well around the part which gets filled with ln2 from a dewar.

walrus013• 5 years ago

Indeed so, I remember seeing people do temporary "overclocking world records" with things like 900 MHz Pentium 3s, and Athlons, around twenty years ago, bare motherboard on an open table with liquid nitrogen dewar mounted to the CPU socket. Guys pouring more nitrogen into the thing as it evaporates and they run benchmarks. I guess the procedure for that probably hasn't changed very much, since it's a very ephemeral and temporary process.

galangalalgol• 5 years ago

Do you need some form of sonicator to keep bubbles from sticking?

trashtester• 5 years ago

A cryogenic cooling system usually just vents the gas into the room, it may just be a little well around the part which gets filled with ln2 from a dewar.

It depends on the scale, and whether the cooling is only required for a short while.

Large scale cryogenics (such as at CERN, an LNG tanker etc) will recompress the vapor as it forms.

If so, the loop basically IS as refrigerator, just a much bigger, higher performing unit.

For an extreme example, see: https://home.cern/science/engineering/cryogenics-low-tempera...

saganus• 5 years ago

The Kryotech SuperG!

http://www.thg.ru/cpu/19991115/print.html

That was mindblasting for me at the time and remember I dreamed of buying one.

Now I have a multi-ghz Ryzen 270p.. not even the latest and gratest and take it for granted.

Those were the days...

walrus013• 5 years ago

It's unfortunate that the images seem to be gone now, because I remember it being quite a feat of engineering for its era.

It looks like there's some shots of it here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/432/2

kirse• 5 years ago

Man what a throwback, memories I forgot I had. I was all about upgrading my K6-2 450 to a 550, but was equally fun to cheer on AMD's Slot A chips that had begun to erase Intel's dominance at the time.

qzw2• 5 years ago

The peak of tech excitement in my entire life was when a friend brought a copy of Computer Shopper to school, and the cover proclaimed a new 90Mhz 486!! No other tech ever blew my mind like that again.

ant6n• 5 years ago

Upgrading from 450 to 550? I once had an AMD Duron 650, which I overclocked very late in its life to 850MHz simply by increasing the FSB from 100MHz to 133Mhz (or so), no extra cooling or anything.

xxs• 5 years ago

LN2 is pretty standard for extreme overclocking. Requires a lot of preparation due to water condensation and some blow torch heating for the system to start up as it can fail to boot entirely.

It's fairly simple and most pundits can do it at home if they so desire.

lambdaba2• 5 years ago

The biggest overclocking story of all time was when people discovered that (many/most?) 300Mhz Celerons where intentionally mislabeled 450Mhz ones, because apparently the yields where such that they couldn't not make mostly 450Mhz ones.

rasz2• 5 years ago

Those werent miss-labeled, as there were never 450MHz Celerons. This overclockability was due to excellent 0.25um lithography process Intel was wielding at the time. Every Intel CPU had same MHz ceiling, even older laptop 200MHz Pentium 1 MMX Tillamook CPUs overclocked to over 400MHz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqB4yCssUCM. This was also one of the reasons for Intel to start fighting with overclockers by locking multipliers.

cm2187• 5 years ago

Also reminds me of this old video (early 2000s) that shows what happens when you remove the heatsink. This is what cemented that image in my head of “AMD=cheap knockoff” that AMD reversed only 2-3 years ago (and now I am trying to source an EPYC Milan!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYQSHXNFvUk

kalleboo• 5 years ago

This exact video had a big impact on my impressions of those companies as well, it's pretty amazing how long those views last.

rasz2• 5 years ago

What you probably never saw was the non-retraction retraction Tomshardware had to publish later, and buried so deep even archive.org doesnt have access anymore. Yes, they manually excluded the link from wayback machine :o

Here is the whole story: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365-4.html somehow still accessible under its original 2001 link unlike most of their old material, wonder why :)

"AMD did not bless the Thunderbird core with ANY thermal protection whatsoever."

In reality AMD socket certification required thermal cutout, same as Intel for Pentium 3. AMD processors do include thermal diode just like Intel ones.

"Intel's older processor is also equipped with a thermal diode and a thermal monitoring unit"

is a lie. Pentium 3 thermal throttling is performed by the Bios just like in Athlon case. Serendipitously tomshardware picked broken Siemens motherboard for AMD system as recommended by Intel, imagine that.

They published a non-retraction catching Siemens in a lie and showing proper AMD setup safely shutting down. Of course you cant read it because its buried down, excluded from wayback machine and deadlinked http://www.tomshardware.com/column/01q4/011029/index.html

qzw2• 5 years ago

One reference point: my home built Ryzen 3700x machine gets almost exactly 100,000 points less than the system they tested.

zibzab5• 5 years ago

That's laptop territory for zen3 :(

I urgently need a new computer but have been holding for cheap zen3 machines to become available since the difference in performance is so huge.

maesij2• 5 years ago

Funny maths, "As you can see, in Cinebench R23, the dual EPYC Milan 7763's are 34% faster than the dual Ice Lake Xeon 8380's."

taneliv• 5 years ago

Yeah, I also wondered about that, isn't it more like 52% faster?

TwoBit2• 5 years ago

Depends on how you define the math of "x% faster than"

tromp• 5 years ago

Indeed, the EPYC is 52% faster than the Xeon, which makes the Xeon 34% slower than then EPYC.

TwoBit2• 5 years ago

(113000 - 74000) / 113000 = 34%

mkl• 5 years ago

Yes, but that's the opposite denominator from usual. If I say I got 50% more apples from my trees this year, I can only really mean (this_year - last_year)/last_year = 50% (i.e. 1.5 times as many).

maesij2• 5 years ago

Incorrect. 74k should be in the denominator, that is what's being compared against (baseline).

atdrummond2• 5 years ago

Sadly, I’ve had to stick with Intel, even with the performance penalty. Why? The massive AMD core counts were killing us on licensing costs. Until we can renegotiate our contracts, we remain an Intel shop.

skavi• 5 years ago

IIRC AMD offers high frequency lower core count SKUs. Would those not work for your situation?

abestic9• 5 years ago

The 72F3 was made almost specifically for this use case, though it's comparable (and may even fall behind per-core) to the Xeon 8356H.

dvfjsdhgfv2• 5 years ago

It looks like your vendor is not keeping up with the times.

merb• 5 years ago

it doesn't specifically we are a dell shop and they always priced their amd epyc server's higher. I'm not sure why, maybe they also added their board design development costs on top, where as intel they have more knowledge, so it's cheaper? no clue, but sometimes it's really wierd that we get really good prices for intel, but not for amd.

ur-whale• 5 years ago

Time to switch to another software stack.

zibzab5• 5 years ago

I suspect this is about oracle.

Not an easy migration of you are deep in their ecosystem.

ChuckNorris89• 5 years ago

Wait, what?! I thought the license/core was a thing in the UNIX/NT days, when running more then one core/system meant you were doing serious mainframe/datacenter business, but you're telling me this is still a thing now in the days when a smartphone has 8 cores?

blandflakes• 5 years ago

I wish I could recall which software service this was, but when I was handling infra for a small biotech startup a lot of price evals for metrics or CI/CD tools would still penalize us for core counts.

syspec• 5 years ago

As a quick reminder, AMD's flagship 7763 server chips come armed with the 64 Zen 3 cores and 128 threads apiece and have a 2.45 GHz base and 3.5 GHz boost frequency. All told, we're looking at a Cinebench run with 128 cores and 256 threads, which you can see in the tweet below:

Can someone clarify this wording?

It has 64 cores which can each do 128 threads? That doesn't seem right... but then later it says it has 128 cores

flumpcakes• 5 years ago

1 processor has 64 cores with SMT giving 128 hardware threads.

In a dual socket configuration that is:

2 processors, 128 cores, 256 threads.

totalZero• 5 years ago

Dual 7763s, each with 64 cores (128 threads). The "apiece" modifies chips, not cores.

wdroz• 5 years ago

I'm looking forward for the scores of the Zen3 AMD threadripper. I'm just not sure if I should upgrade as soon as they are out or if I should wait the next-gen for DDR5...

zibzab5• 5 years ago

With all the hype around new efficient laptop CPUs I had to check how they compare to this monster...

This thing: 113K

Best AMD laptop CPU: 11K

Best intel laptop: 7.5K

Beat Apple laptop: 7.5K

That is 12x to 15x slower, which honesty was better than I expected.

mvanaltvorst• 5 years ago

If you take this CPU with its 280W TDP and scale it down to 18W like an Apple M1, you get a score of ~7200 while the Apple M1 gets 7700. Actually pretty amazing how close the performance per watt is to be honest; totally different form factors, different CPU architecture, different R&D (both having spent billions of dollars), different fabs, but still within 10% performance/watt. Makes you wonder how close we are to the physical limits.

zibzab5• 5 years ago

Yeah, but don't forget that creating systems with massive core count is much more than just scaling up. It is a whole different science and art. Just handling the heat generated by 280W requires teams of hundreds of engineers. And IPC for 8 cores is child play compared to IPC for 64 cores.

You can already see this with M1: the 10W M1 reaches 7.5K while the 18W (15?) M1 is IIRC around 8.7K on cinebench

makkesk8• 5 years ago

Keep in mind that every vendor defines TDP differently, linustechtips have highlighted this many times and even has a video on it [1].

So comparing TDP across manufactures is not a fair comparison.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDWO177BjZY

fleetfox• 5 years ago

Probably large chunk of that difference is consumed by interconnect (infinity fabric)

hajile• 5 years ago

Anandtech says during their testing that pretty much all the chips were in the 220w range.

At 18w and 7,833 points, that's 435 per watt for the M1

At 440w for 2 chips and 113,631 points, that's 258 per watt for the Milan

At around 140w and 10,096, that's about 74 per watt for the 5950x

At around 75w and 4,517, that's about 61 per watt for the 5600x

At around 140w and 5,994, that's about 43 per watt for the 5800x

Frequency scaling is TERRIBLE for PPW (performance per watt). The screaming almost 5GHz 5800 cores lose efficiency to the downclocking 5950 cores by almost 2x. Vs the 2.5GHz Milan, it's right at 6x difference.

Apple is on the right track pushing wider rather than faster, but that seems like a path that is hard for x86 to take due to decoder power and complexity (decode units literally eat up more die space than the actual integer math units). It isn't all roses though. A huge portion (30-50%) of the Milan power budget is the interconnect. If you double the TDP on the M1 to simulate the interconnect, PPW drops to around 217 which is about 16% worse than AMD.

We also haven't factored in how AMD gets a huge performance boost with a quarter-gig of cache. Apple likely has to scale up their cache too. 16mb and 8 cores is 2mb/core. 256mb/64 is 4mb/core. But because it's multicore and all cores don't necessarily do the same job at the same time on a server, M1's deal with the devil starts to fade. It will need even more cache per core to keep up with the ultra-wide execution path (else lose PPW) which will increase total power and further reduce max clockspeeds. M1 is a great chip in laptops, but if scaling up were easy, everyone would be doing it.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16529/amd-epyc-milan-review/5

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

AMD's EPYC Milan Breaks Cinebench Record, Here's a 10nm Ice Lake Xeon Comparison

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