That's barely more than my single 12400F with only 6 cores (when performing work). Wow.

12400F max turbo power is 117 watts.

Maybe if you don't overclock it to 5.3GHz. I can easily pull 130.

You're comparing a cheap consumer grade 6core overclocked well beyond design operating at full load to a high end datacenter chip designed for performance and efficiency under idle conditions.

Your statement is correct, but I'm not sure the comparison really means much?

>high end datacenter chip designed for performance and efficiency under idle conditions.

Nothing datacenter AMD is efficient under idle condition.

If your lights don't dim when overclocking, are you truly overclocking?

What does the equivalent EPYC consume?

>Single-socket submissions show that AMD's 128-core, 256-thread Epyc 9754 scores right around 922 in the benchmark, about 2.58x higher than Ampere's top-specced Altra, the M128-30, which comes in at 356.

>While a clear win for AMD's Bergamo, it doesn't take into consideration other elements like power consumption. AMD's part is rated for 360W and can be configured up to 400W, while Ampere's has a TDP of just 182W. So yes, it may be 2.5x times faster, but it potentially uses 2-2.2x more power.

that's still a major win for AMD. 2x performance per core means you need half as many servers (which is way cheaper) and all your latency bound operations happen twice as quickly. (also I'm pretty sure you can underclock the AMD system to the point where it's the same power and 50% more performance)

At a certain density, though, power budgets come into consideration.

For 2 or 4 sockets per RU, you could be dealing with hundreds of kW per rack, and the heat that entails.

For certain deployments that could make sense. For others, a lower power, but still high core count solution could be better.

You can always solve power density by not fully populating a rack or underclocking or both. If Epyc is better it's better; it doesn't depend on density.

It's definitely better for certain workloads.

I would assume that undervolting and underclocking will likely drop that power consumption quite considerably.

> For others, a lower power, but still high core count solution could be better.

I think OP's point is that you'd need over twice the number of the lower density cores to get the same performance, thus by going that route you'd end up needing more power to get the same computational resources.

To put it simply, with ARM you'd need a 4U to get almost the same compute as a 2U of AMD.

Let’s round that to 200 watts difference. At 20c per kWh that’s an opex difference of about $1 per day.

Public cloud providers will sell you that amount of compute for about $50-$100 per day.

The lower end of that is the Ampere processor and the high end would be the AMD 128-core processor.

In other words, they can make $49 more by using the AMD CPU per day.

The article answers this: Bergamo is 360W and Ampere One is 350W. I suspect the 256T Bergamo is faster than 192T Ampere One.

256 hyperthreads may be not exactly comparable to 192 dedicated cores, but it depends on the type of load, and needs measurement.

The AMD part's power budget is about 2.7W per core, and Ampere's, 1.8W. None of these cores look like very high speed. Their performance will also likely depend heavily on efficiency of caches and access to RAM, not just cores' internals.

For chips like these, they are complex enough that even benchmarking them to figure out which one is faster is a chore.

It depends on how the memory channels work, what kind of optimizations you use in your benchmarking tools, how power delivery is handled on the motherboard, and that's before you consider the way the CCDs or cross-core communication happens (which is unique on each of the major architectures (Xeon/EPYC/Ampere)).

Anandtech had a great article comparing previous-generation server chips and found that memory access, L2/L3 access, and other cross-core communication varied dramatically on different chips, and even when BIOS was configured certain ways!

To that end, I wonder if there are benchmarks or standard methods that also measure “deep” utilisation — not just keeping cores “busy” but actually saturating their processing capacity.

> For chips like these, they are complex enough that even benchmarking them to figure out which one is faster is a chore.

If two chips are hard to tell apart in terms of performance, that just means that they are practically equivalent. This means other factors come in play, such as ISA and cost.

They are not hard to tell apart, AFAICT; they are hard to reduce to a single number for easy comparison.

Your point stands though.

There are a pile of BIOS settings which are BIOS settings precisely because there isn't a right answer for every workload. DIMM channel ganging, DIMM bank interleave, socket interleave, NUMA chiplet vs socket descriptions, NUMA weights, and on an on frequently have 5%-10% or more of an impact on a given workload. Change the workload and those numbers all change. Its like playing with compiler flags, this or that flag raises or lowers the perf of this or that part of a given benchmark. If there was a concrete answer, they wouldn't be flags.

In a lot of cases when machines are within 20% of each other, its quite possible the real difference between the two results is how many hours a perf engineer has spent tuning the workload.

In a way this is why the simple microbenchmarks are as important as the system level ones. The simpler ones are easier to tune and give a speed of light for a given operation.

Idle power consumption is more important for desktop and mobile, and IMHO 136W idle seems quite high. That article says it gets close to 400W under full load.

Power consumption is important in mobile regardless of idle or full load. That’s why MacBooks are better than non MacBooks. Even under load they outperform traditional laptops for performance per watt

Not really. A M2 Pro draws something like 40W under all-core load which is comparable to AMD Ryzen mobile CPUs with similar performance. The long battery life of the MBP is almost entirely due to the crazy low idle consumption of the entire system (not only the CPU).

And yet, I can’t take any windows laptop I’ve ever owned to work without a charger and work all day and come home. But can do that with the M2 MacBook. Cos under full load, the performance and battery life exceeds that of windows laptops.

That's because the MacBook idles well, and most of the time is spent idling. Some modern Windows machines like the T14s Gen2 AMD come close, but others don't.

Maybe you haven't used sufficiently new AMD laptops. Because my Ryzen 5800H and 6800H laptops (16 and 14 inch) can easily last a day despite using TSMC 7nm instead the much more efficient 5nm process that Apple has been enjoying.

Macbooks are fantastic but there is no magic. Manufacturing is extremely important

I have a 5800h laptop and 3-4 hours pails to the 8-10 hours I’m getting on the MacBook for the same workload.

No arguments there. The M1/2 last longer. However, this largely due to TSMC 5nm node. The Ryzen 7800u will close the gap for sure

You can do that with a 12th/13th gen too, though it depends on what “work” is. I’m not sure there is any laptop that would last a day using the average enterprise setup (two IPSes, three “endpoint protectors”, two AVs, heavy WMI scripts constantly running and MS Teams always open), simply because the thing won’t get under 40% CPU during the day. The advantage of a MacBook here would simply be that 90% of the mentioned software doesn’t exist for the platform.

I have heard the joke that MobileIron (an enterprise software for iOS devices) had its name because it turns you iPhone into a mobile iron.

Go ahead and actually draw long term CPU load and clocks. You will discover that you're nowhere near full load most of the time.