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More CPU Competition Coming for Intel

On January 9, 2019, AMD CEO and President Dr. Lisa Su presented a CES 2019 Keynote. During the keynote, she demonstrated a new desktop processor, (at 1:25:00 in the video). This was a 7nm, 8C/16T, 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen 3000 series “Matisse” desktop processor running the Cinebench R15 Multithreaded (MT) benchmark vs. a 14nm, 8C/16T Intel Core i9-9900K “Coffee Lake” desktop processor.

System Comparison

These two systems were as identical as possible (outside of the motherboard and processor), meaning identical 2666MHz memory, video card, and storage. The Intel system was running at stock clock speeds vs. an engineering sample Ryzen running at lower than final clock speeds. The Cinebench MT score for Intel was 2040, while the Cinebench MT score for the AMD Ryzen 2 was 2057. The Intel system was using 179.8 watts, while the AMD system was using 133.4 watts during benchmark. This benchmark pegs all of the cores in the system, so this is extremely significant!

Dr. Su held up one of these Ryzen 2 processors, showing a 14nm I/O die on the left and the 7nm 8C/16T Zen 2 processor die on the top right. It was pretty obvious that there was room on the package for another identical Zen 2 processor die on the bottom right. During interviews over the next couple of days, Dr. Su basically confirmed that the Zen 2 family had room for an extra processor die and that we should expect a higher core count SKU. AMD purposely used an eight core CPU for the demo so that they would have the same core count as Intel’s current top of the line processor.

Processor Details

It appears that what AMD demonstrated was actually a mid-range Ryzen 5 class SKU, running with artificially slow memory, at a non-final lower clock speed that still had a slightly higher Cinebench MT score (with the same core/thread count) as the current best mainstream desktop processor that Intel has available. Since the core/thread counts were the same between the two systems, this means that the single-threaded performance should be about the same. If this is true, then this would be the first time in an extremely long time where AMD has better single-threaded performance than Intel. The final version of these Zen 2 processors should perform even better than this early sample.

Conclusion

You may be wondering what this has to do with server processors and with SQL Server. It turns out that the upcoming 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” processors use the same Zen 2 architecture and 7nm manufacturing process as these Zen 2 mainstream desktop processors. If the 7nm AMD EYPC Rome processors end up having better single-threaded performance than the upcoming 14nm Intel Cascade Lake-SP processors (which I think is pretty likely), then AMD is going to be extremely competitive in the server market and for SQL Server usage. This is especially true if you consider AMD’s advantage in memory density, PCIe lanes (which will be Gen 4.0) and hardware cost. Dr. Su actually did a demonstration of a one-socket AMD EPYC Rome system vs. a two-socket Intel Xeon 8180 system, showing the AMD system winning.

Both the desktop Ryzen 2 and the server EPYC Rome processors are due to be released in mid-2019.

AdoredTV has their analysis here, while UFD Tech has their analysis here. Anandtech has a good writeup here.
 

 

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