Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

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You mean this? https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/07/11/amd-epyc-performance...

If by crushing it you mean performed nearly identically, and if by 5 years old you mean the very latest E5 chip Intel offers[1], then yes.

Also, they were using EPYC through a cloud VM provider, which means not only is there the typical overhead of Xen, but also possibly some aggressive Spectre mitigations. Their Haswell machine was likely bare metal.

[1] Because E5 and E7 chips only migrate microarchitecture every few generations. But since Intels fab headaches they're actually stuck nearly 4 generations behind, rather than the typical 2-3. Only desktop and E3 series chips use the latest microarchitecture.

EDIT: I forgot they changed their naming scheme. The latest 56-thread capable Xeon Platinum chips available last year used Skylake. I was confirming my understanding with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon but didn't see this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_microproces...

The E5 v3 is not the latest even under the old naming scheme. It is a chip from 2014. The E5 v4 "Broadwell" came out in 2016. Skylake SP came out in 2017 and Cascade Lake SP is the current SKU. The EPYC performance on that MySQL benchmark is 3 generations behind Intel.

> The EPYC performance on that MySQL benchmark is 3 generations behind Intel.

Intel's performance hasn't changed for 3 generations, either. They've been stagnant for years now with their 10nm roadmap being super late at this point, delaying their architecture updates at the same time.

Definitely wrong. Skylake SP is 50% faster than Broadwell on MySQL Sysbench, and Broadwell was 200% faster than Sandy Bridge. That's almost 500% improvement in 6 years. I haven't got a chance to evaluate Cascade Lake SP yet but I expect the pace of improvement to continue and they have hardware mitigations for Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF.

Horseshit. Unless you're comparing different core counts that'd make MySQL the extreme outlier against hundreds of other tests that have shown again and again and again and again that Intel's IPC has been stagnant for years now with OK but minimal frequency improvements.

With numbers like this you really need to link some benchmarks. I can't find anything remotely similar.

The blog post and cloud provider's website both say the servers are bare metal.

I stand corrected. I didn't see it mentioned on the page but assumed because it was a "cloud server" that they were using multi-tenant infrastructure. But apparently for all servers they're bare metal, presumably provisioned with IPMI.

I still disagree with the previous poster's claims and conclusions, but I really should've done my homework better. I tried but clearly not hard enough.

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