AMD

AMD’s new EPYC (Naples) 7000 series processors, can meet or exceed the computing power you need for a lower cost, with high core clock, high counts and low wattage power draws, AMD EPYC processors offer a competitive edge when it comes to performance. Based on AMD testing of the 7000 series, when compared to last generations 6300 series processors, offer up to a 37% performance uplift and support 2666MHz of DDR4 RAM and PCI-e 3.0. Plus. For high core count CPUs and high memory count for a lower price, consider going with an AMD solution from Aspen Systems.

With up to 64 physical cores in a dual processor server, you get over 12% more CPU cores than the latest Intel Xeon processors. Additionally, you get up to 25% better integer performance on the specint_rate2006 benchmark for 2-socket servers as compared to the top of the line Intel Xeon Processor, E5-2699A v4. Need floating point? AMD CPUs can perform up to 59% better on floating point performance on the specfp_rate2006 benchmark for 2-socket servers compared to the E5-2699A v4 processors. Need more threads? With a dual-socket AMD system, each core can be split to run two threads, and you can get up to 128 total compute threads.

The Infinity Fabric is AMD’s new socket-to-socket interconnect. This is the successor to what was AMD’s HyperTransport, only the new interconnect has a better software-defined interconnect. This allows for better multi-die scalability, and socket-to-socket connectivity. What’s this all mean and how does this differ from Intel’s CPUs? In summary, while Intel tries to put everything on chip and use their QPI as infrequently as possible, AMD uses their Infinity Fabric for everything they can to get a lower cost, and more highly connected way of communicating across components in a server.

If you’re looking for a lot of PCIe lanes, you can use a single socket AMD EPYC system to get a massive 128 lanes of PCIe 3.0. This is perfect for GPU computing where you can add eight (8) x16 PCIe GPU cards onto a single CPU without the need for a PCIe switch or expander. If you need a massive NVMe server, this is also a good way to go. One rule to remember is that adding a second CPU does not allow you to have 256 PCIe lanes, but the current Infinity Fabric architecture only allows for a total of 128 lanes, no matter how many CPUs you have on the board.

While Intel’s current servers only have four or six memory channels per socket, AMD’s EPYC CPUs come with eight memory channels per socket. You can also load up two memory DIMMs per channel for a total of 32 memory DIMMs in a 2-socket server. With up to 2666Mhz performance, you can easily get up to 2TB of RAM in a dual-socket server by using 64GB DIMMs, by using the 128GB DIMMs, you can get up to a massive 4TB of RAM. Not only do you get eight memory channels per socket, most of the EPYC CPUs come with 64MB of L3 cache. This gives AMD a better balance of resources to make your real-world workloads perform better: more cores, more memory, more memory bandwidth, and more I/O capacity.