Back in October following the launch of the EPYC 9005 “Turin” processors I ran an AVX-512 performance comparison for the EPYC 9755 with 512-bit data path vs. 256-bit data path vs. AVX-512 disabled. That was interesting for showing the benefits of Zen 5’s full 512-bit data path support compared to the “double pumped” approach with Zen 4 or optionally used via a BIOS option on Zen 5. AVX-512 continues to prove to be very performant and power efficient with AMD Zen 5 processors unlike with the early generations of AVX-512 on Intel processors. Here is a fresh look at the AVX-512 performance on a Supermicro server with an AMD EPYC 9655 processor.
Today’s article is a fresh look at the AVX-512 performance for the EPYC 9005 series. There are new/updated benchmarks / applications being used as well as now relying on a Supermicro H13SSL-N 4U server build rather than just the AMD “Volcano” reference server used in the original EPYC Turin benchmarks around launch day.
Originally I also planned to run this new AVX-512 comparison with a prior generation EPYC 9654 processor in order to provide a Zen 4 vs. Zen 5 AVX-512 server comparison. This Supermicro motherboard and latest BIOS are supposed to support both EPYC 9004 and EPYC 9005 series processors, but I was unable to get the motherboard to POST when installing an EPYC 9654… So something seems awry with the Supermicro support. They also don’t offer any prior versions of their BIOS on the Supermicro website, so I am still waiting to hear back from them with a solution for getting EPYC Zen 4 booting with this motherboard. So a future article may extend these fresh Zen 5 AVX-512 benchmarks to also include a comparison to prior-gen Genoa.
Another caveat is that with the original AVX-512 benchmarks from October, the AMD Volcano BIOS allowed changing between the 256-bit and 512-bit data path for AVX-512. With the Supermicro BIOS there wasn’t this option but only the ability to enable/disable AVX-512. Thus it’s a comparison today of 512-bit AVX-512 versus completely disabled for this 5th Gen EPYC server.
In any case these EPYC 9655 results are interesting on their own for a fresh look at the AVX-512 performance benefits and impact on CPU power consumption / thermals / clock frequency. Compared to the original AVX-512 Zen 5 benchmarks, this round was also done on Ubuntu 24.10 with the Linux 6.13 kernel and latest GCC 14.2 compiler.
