The first benchmarks of AMD’s Epyc Milan server CPUs based on the Zen 3 core architecture have surfaced, showing single-threaded gains of around 20-30%. This is in line with the ST performance uplifts that we saw with the Ryzen 5000 consumer CPUs. However unlike the latter, server workloads aren’t latency sensitive (gaming), and AMD was already almost on par with the fastest Xeons across the board.
With Milan, the single-threaded performance metric weighs heavily in AMD’s favor, and even Ice Lake-SP will only be able to level the playing ground, rather than taking the lead.
In terms of pure IPC gains, you get a boost of 11-18%, again in the same range as Vermeer. Both the chips were tested at a frequency of 2.4GHz with quad-channel DDR4-2133MHz memory.
The multi-threaded gains are mild, as expected, but this won’t be an issue as AMD already had a massive lead over the Intel Xeons in this segment. It’ll be interesting to see how the server market reacts to the Milan launch. Intel has already delayed the Ice Lake-SP to Q1 2020. Although the next-gen Epyc chips are also slated to land in Q1, they have already started shipping to select clients.
