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AMD Opteron Vs EPYC: How AMD Server Performance Evolved Over 10 Years (phoronix.com)
New submitter fstack writes: Phoronix has carried out tests comparing AMD's high-end EPYC 7601 CPU to AMD Opteron CPUs from about ten years ago, looking at the EPYC/Opteron Linux performance and power efficiency. Both on the raw performance and performance-per-Watt, the numbers are quite staggering though the single-threaded performance hasn't evolved quite as much. The EPYC 7601 is a $4,200 USD processor with 32 cores / 64 threads. The first of many tests was with NAS Parallel Benchmarks: "For a heavily threaded test like this, going from a single Opteron 2300 series to the EPYC 7601 yielded around a 40x increase in performance," reports Phoronix. "Not bad when also considering it was only a 16x increase in the thread count (4 physical cores to 32 cores / 64 threads). The EPYC 7601 has a lower base clock frequency than the Opteron 2300 CPUs tested but has a turbo/boost frequency higher, among many architectural advantages over these K10 Opterons. With the NASA test's Lower-Upper Gauss-Seidel solver, going from the dual Opteron 2384 processors to a single EPYC 7601 yields around a 25x improvement in performance over the past decade of AMD server CPUs. Or in looking at the performance-per-Watt with the LU.C test, it's also around a 25x improvement over these older Opterons."
Moores "law" was doubling of transistors, not performance. But it's not a law and has already failed in both senses of the word. Intel just delayed their 10nm CPU again. AMD announced their next generation shrink will be 12nm, given that the current CPUs are 14nm that's going to be a rather slow increase. Generation to generation improvements are on the order of 10-33% on most metrics and take quite a bit longer than 18 months to come out.
Agreed, which if you think about it justifies more expensive desktops on a longer replacement cycle. Go ahead and spend the extra few hundred on ram, cpu, motherboard and case. The plan on keeping it for 7-10 years. The next doubling is going to take even longer than the last one.
You wonder why the more expensive Xeon was slower than the cheaper Epyc? Probably because Intel has been milking you...
Ezekiel 23:20