Much PR fluff
First, Ampere is claiming performance from its parts in excess of the dual
AMD EPYC 7742 by a small margin.
That is AMD’s second-highest performing EPYC part behind the HPC focused AMD EPYC 7H12 but it is also AMD’s highest-end mainstream SKU. Ampere Altra is also claiming a massive estimated Specrate2017_int_base figure over the dual
Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 configuration. As we discussed in our
Big 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Refresh piece, Intel has a new Xeon Gold 6258R which is a better comparison point now. While we expect the Xeon Gold 6258R to perform like the Xeon Platinum 8280, comparable numbers have not been published. Ampere, to its credit, is not using the Platinum 8280 list price so this is well done.
Ampere Altra Performance Specrate2017_int_base
When we get to the endnotes, we see how Ampere got to these figures. The Altra part is a dual-socket 3.3GHz platform using GCC 8.2. Ampere did not disclose the TDP here but that is OK at this point.
What we will note is that Ampere de-rated both the AMD EPYC 7742 and Xeon Platinum 8280 results by 16.5% and 24% respectively. This was done to adjust for using GCC versus AOCC2.0 and ICC 19.0.1.144. Ampere disclosed this, and it is a big impact. Arm servers tend to use GCC as the compiler while there are more optimized compilers out there for AMD and Intel. For some reference point that is why we showed both optimized and GCC numbers in our large launch-day
ThunderX2 Review and Benchmarks piece.
Ampere Altra End Note 1
This de-rate practice for ICC and AOCC is common in the industry and Ampere disclosed it clearly. We will note that while it is not enough to tip the balance on the Xeon side, it does mean that the 2019-era AMD EPYC 7742 can provide more performance than the future 2020-era Ampere Altra 3.3GHz.
Ampere in the slides above states that the Altra has a 3.0GHz maximum turbo. It is interesting that they are using a part here that is running at 10% higher clock speeds, especially with a 4% lead over AMD.