The New AMD EPYC Rome Performance Record

The New AMD EPYC Rome Performance Record

AMD announced the EPYC 7H12 alongside Atos’s watercooled BullSequana supercomputer, and almost immediately Atos started setting more EPYC performance records. The new records add to EPYC Rome’s already-impressive list of 100+ performance records. EPYC Rome has already penetrated heavily into the supercomputing realm, and BullSequana likely won’t be the last supercomputer to adopt the new chips.

According to Atos and AMD, BullSequana set four new records in the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark suite, all of which were previously held by AMD’s EPYC 7742. Thanks to its higher clock speeds, the 7H12 packs about 11% more TFLOPs of performance than the 7742, though that only equated to a few percentage points of extra performance in the SPEC benchmarks. Nonetheless, the 7H12 could easily be as much as 11% faster in other benchmarks or types of workloads, Tomshardware reports.

For 11% more performance than the 7742, the 7H12’s 280W TDP is almost 25% higher. That doesn’t necessarily mean 25% more power consumption, as TDP isn’t a one-to-one mapping to power consumption, but it still represents a significant bump. The 7H12 isn’t inefficient, though, it’s just not as efficient as a slightly slower CPU. In either case, sometimes it’s worth it to sacrifice some efficiency for performance in high performance computing (HPC) workloads.