This is our first formal AMD EPYC 7002 review after our AMD EPYC 7002 Series Rome Delivers a Knockout launch piece. Although John has a few reviews queued up, I wanted to take the P-series AMD EPYC processor reviews myself. Specifically, we are starting with this AMD EPYC 7402P review for two reasons. First, it is perhaps the best value CPU on the market today. Second, at STH, we use a gaggle of EPYC 7401P systems in our lab. The AMD EPYC 740xP series is a single-socket only part with 24 cores. Prices are slightly higher than the previous generation, but they are well worth it. In this review, we are going to show you what makes this solution so compelling.

Key stats for the AMD EPYC 7402P: 24 cores / 48 threads with a 2.8GHz base clock and 3.35GHz turbo boost. There is 128MB of onboard L3 cache. The CPU features a 180W TDP. That cTDP is configurable from 165W to 200W for different applications. These are $1250 list price parts.

Here is what the lscpu output looks like for an AMD EPYC 7402P:

128MB of L3 cache is a massive number. There is also 8MB of L2 cache. For some perspective here, the competitive Intel Xeon Platinum 8268, Platinum 8260, and Gold 6252 are 24 core parts with a relatively measly 35.74MB of cache. A key design principle we hear in the computer industry today is keeping data as close to the compute as possible and reusing that data as much as possible The massive 128MB L3 cache helps achieve this minimizing trips to memory. That is even with 8 channels of DDR4-3200 compared to 6 channels of DDR4-2933 for the current generation Intel Xeon Platinum and Xeon Gold.

Also at STH, we have shown the virtue of the AMD EPYC single-socket offerings. AMD discounts the single-socket only EPYC 7402P by about 30% for having a single-socket only design. That puts the chip in the chip in the same price bracket as a lower clock speed 16 core Intel Xeon Gold 5218. The single-socket story also means that AMD is delivering up to 128 PCIe Gen4 lanes from one CPU. Intel can deliver 48 PCIe Gen3 lanes per processor. Even with two CPUs, AMD has more PCIe lanes and double the bandwidth per lane. You can see our recent Gigabyte R272-Z32 Review to see how a single AMD EPYC $1250 list price part can handle more NVMe storage than two Intel Xeon Platinum 8280‘s or even the Intel Platinum 9200 series.

A Word on Power Consumption

We tested these in a number of configurations. The lowest spec configuration we used is a Supermicro AS-1014S-WTRT. This had two 1.2TB Intel DC S3710 SSDs along with 8x 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM. One can get a bit lower in power consumption since this was using a Broadcom BCM57416 based onboard 10Gbase-T connection, but there were no add-in cards.

Even with that here are a few data points using the AMD EPYC 7402P in this configuration when we pushed the sliders all the way to performance mode and a 180W TDP:

Idle Power (Performance Mode) : 99W

: 99W STH 70% Load : 185W

: 185W STH 100% Load : 212W

: 212W Maximum Observed Power (Performance Mode): 242W

As a 1U server, this does not have the most efficient cooling, still, we are seeing absolutely great power figures here. The impact is simple. If one can consolidate smaller nodes onto an AMD EPYC 7402P system, there are power efficiency gains to be attained as well.

Next, let us look at our performance benchmarks before getting to market positioning and our final words.