AMD is preparing to press Intel in the market of server solutions
This summer, AMD announced their triumphant return to the corporate sector of high-performance computing. With the announcement of new processors on the architectural solutions of the EPYC family, AMD is going to press Intel in the field of equipment for data centers.
/ Photo / twin-loc.fr / CC BY-SA
The main opponent of the EPYC chips on the new battlefield is Intel's Skylake processors. The company dominates the market for processors used by large enterprises in the field of cloud computing, as well as companies with their own infrastructure. The launch of the Xeon Skylake processor line Navin Shenoy, head of the data center team at Intel, called it “the most important announcement for the data center industry over the decade.”
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/ Photos / Kazuhisa OTSUBO / CC BY-SA
Despite this, a number of participants in the IT industry, such as Kurt Marko, assure that Intel’s age of undivided power is coming to an end: cloud services have begun to crowd out the local infrastructure, and the double-digit growth of the company's financial indicators has halved in recent quarters.
At the same time, testing of new products from two competitors showed that the EPYC chip has a number of unexpected advantages in terms of performance for data centers compared to Intel's Xeon.
Intel has integrated the 586-bit expansion of the x86 command system (AVX-512) into its new scalable platform Xeon Skylake, which theoretically doubles the FLOPS and performance of integer calculations compared to the previous version of Xeon. AMD decided to rely on 128-bit vectors, which at first glance puts EPYC at a disadvantage. However, it should be noted that in most high-performance computing today is not used AVX-512.
The Anandtech team tested new products using C-ray, POV-Ray, NAMD and several others. Testing was conducted on dual-processor servers running Ubuntu Linux.
The EPYC processor outperformed Xeon in all three floating point tests. In C-ray, for rendering over a set period of time, EPYC 7601 got 50% better results than Xeon 8176. In the POV-Ray test, the advantage was 16%. For NAMD, Anandtech tried two methods: with AVX and without AVX. In both cases, the EPYC processor came out ahead - by 22% and 41%, respectively.
It is worth noting that the BigData test was also conducted in Anandtech, in which the gap between Xeon and EPYC was just under 5%. In this case, the processors passed the tests, which evaluated the performance with integer calculations and memory access.
Comparing the Xeon 8176 and EPYC 7601, their cost should not be overlooked. Here, AMD has additional potential to weaken Intel’s market position.
In the IT community, opinions on the return of AMD to the corporate sector are divided. Some of them were not very optimistic. For example, on July 18, the company's shares fell by 3.2% due to a negative assessment of AMD's prospects in competition with Intel. Analyst Blaine Curtis (Blayne Curtis) of Barclays concluded that the new product will be "not competitive enough."
He said that they managed to capture some interest from companies such as HP and Dell, but it would take at least a year to evaluate new chips. Provided that AMD has not formed an ecosystem.
AMD understands this, so Scott Aylor, AMD's corporate vice president and corporate solutions manager, stressed that it’s not enough for a company to provide just one product, it’s important to offer customers prospects for the future.
Therefore, AMD claimed responsibility for socket compatibility between EPYC 7000 and Rome. The latter is the code name for the next-generation AMD processor for data centers. At the same time, Aylor is convinced that EPYC will be able to compete with Skylake for 50% of the market for two-socket processors.
/ Photos / AMD Markham Canada / CC BY-SA
This situation has found a response in other IT companies. Girish Bablani, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure Compute, Zhang Ya Qin, president of Baidu, and Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president of server solutions at Dell EMC, spoke in support of AMD. They made it clear that companies are ready to make a choice in favor of new EPYC architectural solutions.
As for Intel's shift from busy positions in the data center segment, even AMD employees are still modest in forecasts, however, as Dave Altavilla from Forbes points out, even a 10 percent share will bring AMD billions in the new highly profitable business.
PS Other articles on the topic of performance in our blog:
/ Photo / twin-loc.fr / CC BY-SACompetitive advantage
The main opponent of the EPYC chips on the new battlefield is Intel's Skylake processors. The company dominates the market for processors used by large enterprises in the field of cloud computing, as well as companies with their own infrastructure. The launch of the Xeon Skylake processor line Navin Shenoy, head of the data center team at Intel, called it “the most important announcement for the data center industry over the decade.”
')
/ Photos / Kazuhisa OTSUBO / CC BY-SA
Despite this, a number of participants in the IT industry, such as Kurt Marko, assure that Intel’s age of undivided power is coming to an end: cloud services have begun to crowd out the local infrastructure, and the double-digit growth of the company's financial indicators has halved in recent quarters.
At the same time, testing of new products from two competitors showed that the EPYC chip has a number of unexpected advantages in terms of performance for data centers compared to Intel's Xeon.
Intel has integrated the 586-bit expansion of the x86 command system (AVX-512) into its new scalable platform Xeon Skylake, which theoretically doubles the FLOPS and performance of integer calculations compared to the previous version of Xeon. AMD decided to rely on 128-bit vectors, which at first glance puts EPYC at a disadvantage. However, it should be noted that in most high-performance computing today is not used AVX-512.
The Anandtech team tested new products using C-ray, POV-Ray, NAMD and several others. Testing was conducted on dual-processor servers running Ubuntu Linux.
The EPYC processor outperformed Xeon in all three floating point tests. In C-ray, for rendering over a set period of time, EPYC 7601 got 50% better results than Xeon 8176. In the POV-Ray test, the advantage was 16%. For NAMD, Anandtech tried two methods: with AVX and without AVX. In both cases, the EPYC processor came out ahead - by 22% and 41%, respectively.
It is worth noting that the BigData test was also conducted in Anandtech, in which the gap between Xeon and EPYC was just under 5%. In this case, the processors passed the tests, which evaluated the performance with integer calculations and memory access.
Comparing the Xeon 8176 and EPYC 7601, their cost should not be overlooked. Here, AMD has additional potential to weaken Intel’s market position.
Fight for market share
In the IT community, opinions on the return of AMD to the corporate sector are divided. Some of them were not very optimistic. For example, on July 18, the company's shares fell by 3.2% due to a negative assessment of AMD's prospects in competition with Intel. Analyst Blaine Curtis (Blayne Curtis) of Barclays concluded that the new product will be "not competitive enough."
He said that they managed to capture some interest from companies such as HP and Dell, but it would take at least a year to evaluate new chips. Provided that AMD has not formed an ecosystem.
AMD understands this, so Scott Aylor, AMD's corporate vice president and corporate solutions manager, stressed that it’s not enough for a company to provide just one product, it’s important to offer customers prospects for the future.
Therefore, AMD claimed responsibility for socket compatibility between EPYC 7000 and Rome. The latter is the code name for the next-generation AMD processor for data centers. At the same time, Aylor is convinced that EPYC will be able to compete with Skylake for 50% of the market for two-socket processors.
/ Photos / AMD Markham Canada / CC BY-SA
This situation has found a response in other IT companies. Girish Bablani, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure Compute, Zhang Ya Qin, president of Baidu, and Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president of server solutions at Dell EMC, spoke in support of AMD. They made it clear that companies are ready to make a choice in favor of new EPYC architectural solutions.
As for Intel's shift from busy positions in the data center segment, even AMD employees are still modest in forecasts, however, as Dave Altavilla from Forbes points out, even a 10 percent share will bring AMD billions in the new highly profitable business.
PS Other articles on the topic of performance in our blog:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/337630/
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