Second-gen AMD Epyc CPUs have broken 11 performance world records, claims Gigabyte

New AMD Epyc benchmarks indicates that Intel has a big fight on its hands in the data centre

AMD's latest second-generation Epyc server CPUs, the 7002 Series ‘Rome' microprocessors, have broken 11 different SPEC benchmark records, according to motherboard maker Gigabyte.

The company claims that the records it has achieved not only best Intel server platforms, but also second-generation Epyc systems put together by rivals.

Taipei, Taiwan-based Gigabyte, which is best known for its motherboards, but also makes laptops and rack servers, said that the systems included Gigabyte's dual socket R282-Z90 rack server and its single socket R272-Z30 rack server, together with AMD's new 64-core Epyc 7742 processor.

The records include seven SPEC CPU 2017 benchmarks and four SPECjbb 2015 benchmarks.

SPEC CPU 2017 is a set of benchmarks intended to measure compute-intensive applications, with two main sub-categories: SPECrate and SPECspeed benchmarks.

SPECrate benchmarks are a measure of throughput, and are intended for measuring multi-threaded compute-intensive applications, such as high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, while SPECspeed benchmarks are a measure of speed and intended for measuring single-threaded compute-intensive applications.

SPECjbb 2015, meanwhile, is a Java Business Benchmark used for evaluating the performance of servers running typical Enterprise Java applications. It is premised on a company with an IT infrastructure handling a mix of point-of-sale requests, online purchases and data-mining operations.

Full details about the Epyc benchmark records can be found on the Gigabyte website.

The benchmarks come less than a month after AMD's Epyc 2 launch. Epyc is based on the second-generation Zen 2 architecture, also used in AMD's Ryzen 3000-series PC CPUs, and produced on TSMC's 7nm process node.

The company has already won over Google as a data centre customer for Epyc.

Bart Sano, vice president of engineering at Google, said that Epyc is delivering "great performance" and that the company expects to cut costs for Google Cloud customers in the coming days as a result. Twitter has also revealed plans to deploy second-gen Epyc chips across its data centre infrastructure later this year.