AMD EPYC Genoa/Genoa-X & Bergamo vs. Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids On Ubuntu 23.10

In total I ran nearly 200 benchmarks on all these processors under Ubuntu Server 23.10 with Linux 6.5. With not many surprises or jaw-dropping differences for many of the results, those wanting to go through all of the individual data (and power / perf-per-Watt) details in full can find the numbers via this OpenBenchmarking.org page.

Here is the CPU power consumption data across all of the benchmarks conducted in full. The Xeon Platinum 8490H was consuming 309 Watts on average to the EPYC 9684X at 251 Watts on average as the while the other EPYC parts were in the 227~244 Watt range. (Note with the peak EPYC power consumption numbers, there does appear to be a Linux kernel regression or some other oddity / race condition or so where a few times the reported CPU power consumption from RAPL/PowerCap is much higher than expected, e.g. 866 Watts for a 1P CPU.)

Lastly is the geometric mean for all of the CPUs tested in this comparison. On Ubuntu Server 23.10, the EPYC 9684X 2P was 1.34x the speed of the Xeon Platinum 8490H 2P. The EPYC 9754 2P Bergamo came in at 1.38x that top-end Sapphire Rapids part. Putting the EPYC CPUs in power determinism mode increased the performance by another ~10% on average. The area where Intel Sapphire Rapids was able to compete the best and outperform Genoa(X) and Bergamo were for AI workloads where the software is able to make great use of AMX.

Anyhow, that's the quick look at these AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors under the recently released Ubuntu 23.10 for those curious about the server performance on Ubuntu 23.10 with GCC 13 and Linux 6.5 while being just a few months out now from the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS milestone. As mentioned, see all the data from this benchmarking bout via this result page.