Intel Hits Back at AMD, Releases its Own Benchmarks to Disprove AMD’s Epyc Claims

The reason behind Intel taking such a step would surely be the importance of data-centric businesses for the company. Data-centric sales are currently worth almost half of Intel’s total revenue. So it’s quite understandable for Intel to do whatever it can to ensure that AMD takes as little as possible of Intel’s market share. The fact that AMD’s upcoming EPYC Rome processors are far superior in terms of core count and manufacturing process to Intel’s Xeon lineup. While Intel’s flagship, the Xeon 8280, features just 28 cores and 56 threads, AMD’s EPYC Rome CPUs will feature up to 64 cores and 128 threads. Apart from this, a more modern manufacturing process will also ensure better pricing and less power consumption. All this makes these benchmarks quite crucial for Intel, as it desperately needs something to show against AMD, as most of the other specs seem to be favoring the team Red, at least on paper.
AMD’s CEO Lisa Su, during her keynote at Computex 2019, claimed that her company’s upcoming EPYC Rome data center CPUs, based on the 7nm process node, will be twice as fast as Intel’s Cascade Lake Xeon processors using a well-known benchmark. Intel responded by saying that the Intel test systems were not configured properly and that the processors selected for the benchmark were not the most applicable. Intel has now released its own set of benchmarks to disprove the claims made by AMD.

“BASED ON AMD INTERNAL TESTING OF THE NAMD APO1 V2.12 BENCHMARK. AMD TESTS CONDUCTED ON AMD REFERENCE PLATFORM CONFIGURED WITH 2 X PRE-PRODUCTION 2ND GENERATION EPYC 7NM (“ROME”) 64 CORE SOC, 16 X 32GB DDR4 2933MHZ DIMMS, AND UBUNTU 19.04, 5.0 KERNEL AND USING THE AOCC 2.0 BETA COMPILER WITH OPENMPI 4.0, FFTW 3.3.8 AND CHARMS 6.7.1, ACHIEVED AN AVERAGE OF 19.60 NS/DAY; VERSUS A DELL 740 SERVER CONFIGURED WITH 2 X INTEL XEON PLATINUM 8280 28 CORE CPUS, 12 X 32GB DDR4 2933MHZ DIMMS AND UBUNTU 19.04, KERNEL 5.0 USING THE ICC 19.0.3 COMPILER WITH FFTW 3.3.8 AND CHARMS 6.7.1, ACHIEVED AN AVERAGE OF 9.68 NS/DAY. PERFORMANCE MAY VARY WITH PRODUCTION SILICON.”