AMD EPYC 7002 Series Rome Delivers a Knockout

AMD has really caught Intel with their pants down. In some cases AMD's flagship Epyc 7742 beats dual Xeon Platinum 8280s, and in most benchmarks a single 7742 handily beats a single 8280. A 7742 costs $6,950, while an 8280 costs $10,009. And if you need more memory, the 8280 only supports 1 TB per socket. If you want more, you'll need the 8280M, which supports 2 TB per socket at a recommended price of $13,012 (currently $14,360 on CDW), or the 8280L, which supports 4.5 TB per socket at a recommend price of $17,906 ($21,057 on CDW). By comparison, the 7742 supports 4 TB per socket, meaning you can run a dual-socket system with 8 TB RAM at a fraction of Intel's cost (see ExtremeTech link below). AMD could make major inroads in the HPC market if they manage things right.

AMD is providing over double the performance in some benchmarks for 30% cheaper. A better process, better performance, better efficiency, better price, and (for now) better security make AMD poised to wipe the floor in the server market unless Intel has some magical performance gains up their sleeves. The server market has been Intel's bread and butter for years due to their steep margins; they may have to sell close to or at a loss to hope to compete. That said, Intel is far from dead - they could bleed cash for over a decade before they will really be in trouble, but this is still a massive boon for AMD. Here's hoping we continue to see competition in the CPU world, this market has been stagnant for far too long.

See also:

• Anandtech - AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

• Phoronix - AMD EPYC 7502 + EPYC 7742 Linux Performance Benchmarks

• ExtremeTech - Epic Win: AMD’s 64-core 7nm Epyc CPUs Leave Xeon Lying in the Dirt

• WCCFTech - AMD EPYC Rome Officially Launched: 7nm High-Performance Server CPUs With More Cores, Higher Frequencies – Best-In-Class Performance, Efficiency, and Value

Edit: Added ExtremeTech and WCCFTech links and note on memory capacity.

Edit 2: None of this is taking into account the PCIe lanes. Intel currently provides up to 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0 per socket (80 for dual-socket), but AMD has come out swinging with 128 (single-socket) and 160 (dual-socket) of PCIe 4.0 lanes. Plus, AMD has 45% higher theoretical memory bandwidth. It's not even a comparison at this point.

Edit 3: From page 9 of the ServeTheHome article:

We are looking at somewhere between 3-4 of these dual-socket mainstream Xeon E5 V4 systems from a year ago consolidating into 1 single socket AMD EPYC 7702P system.

Frankly, this completely breaks corporate IT purchasing cycles. Consolidating 6-8 sockets into 1 has an immense VMware licensing impact. Further, we are using about one-quarter of the power even with some of the efficiencies we gained by going 2U 4-node.

I am not surprised that GCP and Azure will be rolling out Epyc servers. Cooling data centers isn't cheap, and Epyc could put a serious dent in costs with equivalent computing capacity.