AMD EPYC Genoa, That’s Some Great Sausage

Taking A Long Look At AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa

AMD seem to have knocked it out of the park with their new EPYC 9004 series, offering a performance increase of 50-60% per core over their previous generation server chips; sometimes significantly more than that.  As EPYC already had a lead over Intel’s Xeon chips in many applications, that means the new Genoa chips leave three year old Xeons in the dust.  ServeTheHome have created what they suspect will be the longest review of the year, which you should peek at.

The naming convention has been updated, those who recall the proposed changes to Ryzen processors will find this somewhat familiar.  This makes more sense for a server chip than an HEDT processor, though you are still going to want the decoder ring handy.  Unfortunately they did not include core count in the naming scheme, something which would have been very handy if clunky to have to say.

To give you a brief overview on performance, we offer up a couple of examples.  If you like compiling kernels, the EPYC 9654 can compile the Linux 4.4.2 kernel from kernel.org over 100 times in an hour.  The c-ray test at 8K completes in 13 seconds, blowing away the competition.  It also topped the Chess benchmark by a fair amount, however STH discovered during testing that the benchmark needs updating at it stopped scaling at a mere 256 threads.

This processing power does come at a cost, when measured at the wall a dual socket AMD EPYC 9654 system pulled between 1kW-1.2kW testing.  That is not significantly more than previous generations but worth noting if you are looking to update your server room.