Today we have our AMD EPYC 7351P Linux benchmarks and review. This is part of a much larger series as many of our longtime readers may have seen with our Intel Xeon Silver 4114 benchmarks earlier this week. Make no mistake, the AMD EPYC 7351P performance is very good. So much so that it is going to make some of our readers feel a bit uncomfortable about purchases they may have been planning to make.

Background: Heavy Legwork to Build a Useful Dataset

At STH, we are working on a major project. We have over $100,000 worth of current generation AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs in the lab. Several racks and 6kW dedicated to a project in the data center. We have the CPUs in-house for over 40% of all the single and dual socket AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Scalable configurations. That is a huge project that we have already invested over $250,000 in that we will be detailing a bit more on soon. Perhaps one of the more interesting areas from all of these different CPUs is around AMD EPYC’s single socket parts. There are three EPYC SKUs: 7351P, 7401P and 7551P that are identical to their dual socket counterparts except for two areas. First, they are single socket capable and cannot be used in dual socket configurations. Second, they are priced at an enormous discount. Today we are going to publish our first EPYC numbers for a single socket only part, the AMD EPYC 7351P.

Up to this point, the vast majority of benchmarks found online have been ad-hoc, at best in their comparisons. Running so many servers to generate data sets is expensive and we have bought CPUs and systems to accelerate our testing schedule. Beyond that, we also have an extremely controlled data center environment where we monitor temperature and humidity as they are key inputs to overall server performance and power consumption. By scaling up our efforts, we are able to quickly provide a complete comparison set.

Comparing the AMD EPYC 7351P today we have other AMD EPYC CPUs in the sub $1000 price range. We also have the entire Xeon Silver range represented in both single, and where applicable, dual socket configurations. These are Intel’s offerings in the sub-$1000 segment (save the Bronze 3104 and 3106 that we already covered.) Today is when the industry moves from ad-hoc one-to-one comparisons to actionable comparisons. Our goal is that as we release even more of our giant data set, buyers will be able to make informed decisions looking at incremental price and performance.

Key stats for the AMD EPYC 7351P: 16 cores / 32 threads, 2.4GHz base and 2.9GHz turbo with a whopping 64MB L3 cache. The CPU features a 170W TDP. Here is the AMD product page with the feature set. Here is the lscpu output for the processor:

Since the AMD EPYC architecture is going to be new for many, we wanted to provide that CPU feature set output. Although you may see 8MB L3 cache in the lscpu output, the chip actually carries a staggering 64MB L3 cache. That means that this ~$750 CPU has more L2+L3 cache than Intel’s top of the line Xeon Scalable 28 core part. AMD achieves this by using four die per package instead of Intel’s single die design which you can read about in our AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Scalable Architecture Ultimate Deep Dive.

Test Configuration

By the end of September, we will have every AMD EPYC SKU tested on a common Tyan EPYC platform and work started on another platform. Here is the base hardware configuration we are using:

CPU: AMD EPYC 7351P

Server Barebones: Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026 (B8026T70AE24HR)

RAM: 8x 16GB 128GB DDR4-2666 RDIMMs (Samsung)

SSD: 1x Intel DC S3710 400GB SATA SSD

NIC: 1x Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro EN VPI

Key to this system is that it supports 24x NVMe U.2 NVMe SSDs without using Broadcom PLX PCIe expanders. That is 96 lanes of PCIe 3.0 directly from a single SKU. One of the key advantages AMD EPYC has is that a single EPYC CPU can use 128x PCIe lanes, the same number as the dual socket configuration. Tyan has responded to this opportunity by offering a single-socket system that can handle 24x NVMe drives plus have I/O available for 10/25/40/50/100GbE.

AMD and Tyan originally suggested that we use a Samsung SSD (as pictured), however, to aid in consistency, we are using our lab standard Intel DC S3710 400GB SSDs.

In our forthcoming system review, we will have data on every CPU from the AMD EPYC 7251 to the EPYC 7601 for those looking at the system.