Intel Ice Lake Xeon-W vs AMD TR Pro Compute Performance (HPL, HPCG, NAMD, Numpy)

The single socket version of Intel third generation Xeon SP is out, the Ice Lake Xeon W 33xx. This is a much better platform with faster large capacity 8 channel memory and PCIe v4 with plenty of lanes. The new Intel platform is very much like the AMD Threadripper Pro (single socket version of EPYC Rome) so this is the obvious comparison to make. Read on to see how the numerical computing testing went!

HPC Parallel Performance for 3rd gen Threadripper, Xeon 3265W and EPYC 7742 (HPL HPCG Numpy NAMD)

On March 19, 2020 I did a webinar titled,
“AMD Threadripper 3rd Gen HPC Parallel Performance and Scaling ++(Xeon 3265W and EPYC 7742)”
The “++(Xeon 3265W and EPYC 7742)” part of that title was added after we had scheduled the webinar. It made the presentation a lot more interesting than the original Threadripper only title! This is a follow up post with the charts and plots of testing results presented in that webinar.

Threadripper 3990x 64-core Parallel Scaling

64 cores is a lot of cores! How well will parallel applications scale on that many cores? The answer, of course, is, it depends on the application. In this post I look at Amdhal’s Law parallel scaling for HPL Linpack, Python numpy and the NAMD molecular dynamics program.

AMD Threadripper 3990x 64-core Linpack and NAMD Performance (Linux)

64 cores! The latest AMD Threadripper is out, the 3990x 64-core. I’ve spent the last couple of days running benchmarks and have some results showing raw numerical compute performance using my standard CPU testing applications HPL Linpack and the molecular dynamics program NAMD. The 3990x is a great processor with exceptional performance. Especially for NAMD! (There were some difficulties and disappointments during the testing and I report those here too.)

AMD Threadripper and (1-4) NVIDIA 2080Ti and 2070 for NAMD Molecular Dynamics

In my recent testing with the AMD Threadripper 2990WX is was impressed by the CPU based performance with the molecular dynamics program NAMD. NAMD makes a good benchmark for looking at CPU/GPU performance since it requires a balance and is usually limited by CPU. After some discussions I decided it would be good to look at multi-GPU performance with NAMD on Threadripper.

AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-core vs Intel Xeon-W 2175 14-core – Linpack NAMD and Kernel Build Time

I recently wrote a post about building and running AMD Threadripper 2990WX with HPL Linpack – a “How-To”. Most of the time I had with the processor went into getting that to work. However, I did run a few other test jobs that I thought the 2990WX would do well with. I compared that against my personal workstation with a Xeon-W 2175. In this post I share those test runs with you. It’s not thorough testing by any means but it was interesting and I was surprised a couple of times with the results.