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Last month Intel introduced their Xeon 6 " [2]Granite Rapids " processors with up to 128 P cores, MRDIMM support, and other improvements as a big step-up in performance and power efficiency for their server processors. The Xeon 6900P series showed they could tango with the AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa/Bergamo processors in a number of areas, but Genoa has been around since November 2022... With today's AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" launch, Zen 5 is coming to servers and delivers stunning performance and power efficiency. The new top-end AMD EPYC Turin processor performance can obliterate the competition in most workloads and delivers a great generational leap in performance and power efficiency. Here are our first 5th Gen AMD EPYC Turin benchmarks in looking at the EPYC 9575F, EPYC 9755, and EPYC 9965 processors across many workloads and testing in both single and dual socket configurations.

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Since beginning with [4]Zen 5 testing earlier this year with the Ryzen AI 300 series and Ryzen 9000 desktop processors, I have been super eager for 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors. As shown across numerous articles the past few months, Zen 5 delivers great generational uplift and evolved power efficiency. The Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors have been tackling HPC and technical workloads very well and great gains over the Ryzen 7000 series. The Zen 5 gains here with HPC / technical computing have been much more significant than Ryzen 9000 series gains for gamers. All my hopes for EPYC Turin have panned out true over the past few weeks of testing these Zen 5 server processors.

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Xeon 6 Granite Rapids with the Xeon 6980P benchmarking has been stronger than I initially expected but AMD EPYC 9005 series vastly erodes the advantages seen over the past few weeks. The AMD EPYC 9005 series with a full 512-bit data path for AVX-512, DDR5-6000 memory support (or DDR5-6400 in some configurations), up to 192 cores per socket with the dense cores or 128 classic cores, and other Zen 5 improvements make for a very strong showing by Turin. In my round-the-clock benchmarking to prepare for launch day, the AMD EPYC 9005 processors have shown to deliver significant generational uplift for performance and power efficiency while primed to compete with and largely outperform Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids. If you didn't read already, more background information on the AMD EPYC 9005 series is available from the [6]5th Gen AMD EPYC overview article .

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My testing for this launch-day review builds upon all the data I've been running the past number of months re-testing prior generation Intel and AMD CPUs on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and preparations for the Xeon 6 Granite Rapids testing. Wrapped up in time for this 5th Gen EPYC launch day includes benchmarks on:

- Xeon Platinum 8490H

- Xeon Platinum 8490H 2P

- Xeon Max 9480

- Xeon Max 9480 2P

- Xeon Platinum 8592+

- Xeon Platinum 8592+ 2P

- Xeon 6766E

- Xeon 6766E 2P

- Xeon 6780E

- Xeon 6780E 2P

- Xeon 6980P @ DDR5-6400

- Xeon 6980P @ MRDIMM-8800

- Xeon 6980P 2P @ DDR5-6400

- Xeon 6980P 2P @ MRDIMM-8800

- EPYC 9654

- EPYC 9654 2P

- EPYC 9754

- EPYC 9754 2P

- EPYC 9684X

- EPYC 9684X 2P

- EPYC 9575F

- EPYC 9575F 2P

- EPYC 9755

- EPYC 9755 2P

- EPYC 9965

- EPYC 9965 2P

Separately, for those interested in AMD EPYC Turin Dense against ARM CPUs with the Ampere Computing AmpereOne processors, a separate launch day article is looking at the [8]AMD EPYC 9965 vs. AmpereOne A192-32X for an exciting 192-core server CPU showdown.

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The AMD EPYC 9755 as a reminder is the 128-core Turin classic processor with a 500 Watt TDP, the EPYC 9575F is a 400 Watt high frequency 64-core processor, and the EPYC 9965 is the 192-core Turin dense processor with a 500 Watt default TDP. Thanks to AMD for supplying the EPYC Turin processor review samples and SP5 server for being able to deliver launch-day benchmarks on Phoronix.

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The reference server for the EPYC 9005 series is AMD's "Volcano" platform and paired with DDR5-6000 memory. With the 500 Watt TDP rating, Volcano uses a closed-loop liquid cooler within the 2U server and the radiator shared between the two sockets. The AMD Volcano platform is working out nicely and allowed the 500 Watt TDP processors to still operate efficiently. I was running into a DDR5 memory throttling issue in just a few long-running tests cases like WRF but there is a known workaround for that with this reference server platform and am now re-testing those few tests.

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The AMD Volcano server and the EPYC 9005 series processors have been playing out nicely on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The main caveat with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is needing Linux 6.12 (or back-porting a one-line RAPL patch) if interested in Zen 5 CPU power monitor reporting on these CPUs... The same one-liner previously talked about during the Granite Ridge and Strix Point Linux testing. Unfortunate that the simple patch wasn't merged months prior. And then around the PCIe TPH and other SEV improvements there are still some yet-to-be-merged Linux kernel patches. But as noted all of the core functionality for Zen 5 / EPYC 9005 is in place for a nice experience when running modern Linux distributions.

In the coming days on Phoronix will be more follow-up articles on Phoronix looking at the AVX-512 on/off/256-bit performance, SMT on/off, and a variety of other follow-up articles exploring more of the EPYC 9005 series performance.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-epyc-9965-9755-benchmarks&image=amd_epyc_9005_4_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Granite+Rapids

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-epyc-9965-9755-benchmarks&image=amd_epyc_9005_1_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Zen+5

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-epyc-9965-9755-benchmarks&image=amd_epyc_9005_2_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9965-9755-benchmarks

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-epyc-9965-9755-benchmarks&image=amd_epyc_9005_3_lrg

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9965-9755-benchmarks

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-epyc-9965-9755-benchmarks&image=amd_epyc_9005_5_lrg

[10] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-epyc-9965-9755-benchmarks&image=amd_epyc_9005_6_lrg

[11] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-epyc-9965-9755-benchmarks&image=amd_epyc_9005_7_lrg