The AMD EPYC 3101 is currently the lowest-end SKU in the EPYC 3000 line, but it is also one of the most anticipated. Hot on the heels of our EPYC 3201 benchmarks and review piece we are following up with a four core variant that should be the lowest cost SKU in the initial “1” series of AMD EPYC 3000 processors.

Key stats for the AMD EPYC 3101: 4 cores / 4 threads running at a 2.1GHz base clock and up to 2.9GHz turbo. Cache stands at 8MB L3 cache. We are told this chip has a TDP of 35W, making it on par with the AMD Opteron X3421 and 5W more than the 8 core / 8 thread AMD EPYC 3201.

Here is what the lscpu output looks like for the chips:

Testing Configuration

Here is our test configuration for this system:

CPU: AMD EPYC 3101

Motherboard: Supermicro M11SDV-4CT-LN4F

RAM: 2x 32GB DDR4-2666 RDIMMs

SSD: Intel DC S3710 400GB

The Supermicro M11SDV-4CT-LN4F platform we are testing on has a few features that our readers will be interested in. These include the ability to bifurcate the PCIe x16 slot into x4 x4 x4 x4 or x8 x8. We also found SRIO-V support and IOMMU support onboard. Patrick and I were testing these in parallel, and we have tested the bifurcation on the Supermicro M11SDV-8C-LN4F, Supermicro M11SDV-8CT-LN4F, and Supermicro M11SDV-4CT-LN4F and found that the feature worked on all three platforms. STH’s full review is already written and in the publishing queue.

Ubuntu 18.04.2 installed without issue, recognized all of the devices and just worked out of the box and recognized everything on the system.

If you are running a more modern kernel the Zen core is well supported. Docker installed and worked. We joined the platforms to our Kubernetes cluster without issue. We enabled and launched KVM virtual machines without issue. We are well beyond the days of the initial Zen launch to where AMD’s cores are as easy to run on modern kernels as Intel’s cores. That is important for the market and the customers and organizations who are looking to buy in the embedded space.

Please note that as with our other embedded reviews, we focus our power consumption figures on the embedded platforms rather than at the SoC since the platform level features in low power servers have a meaningful impact on power consumption.

Next, let us take a look at the AMD EPYC 3101 performance before we get to our market discussion and final words.