Nearly four years have passed since AMD launched their EPYC Milan-X processors with 3D V-Cache. When recently rearranging some servers in the lab and realizing the four year anniversary was coming up in March, curiosity got the best of me in wondering where the Linux performance and energy efficiency on Milan-X is now with the latest Linux software stack compared to the numbers when Milan-X launched back in March 2022.
When powering up the AMD Daytona X server during some winter-time/year-end cleaning and seeing it still running strong, I was curious to run some fresh benchmarks on the legendary for the time EPYC 7773X processors. With still in the same AMD Daytona-X + EPYC 7773X 2P + 16 x 32GB DDR4-3200 + Intel NVMe SSD configuration as the launch testing in 2022, I decided to see the difference the upgraded software stack made in workloads now on Milan-X.
Back in March 2022 the AMD EPYC 7773X benchmarks were done on an Ubuntu 22.04 snapshot at the time with the Linux 5.15 kernel, GCC 11.2, and other software components for the time. In seeing the very latest state of Linux software, on the same hardware I deployed Ubuntu 25.10 while upgrading to the newly-released Linux 6.18 mainline kernel. Ubuntu 25.10 brings in GCC 15.2 and other up-to-date software components as we close out 2025 and also approach the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April. Plus a newer BIOS software release too.
A number of the benchmark versions originally used back in 2022 failed to build properly under GCC 15 and the like, but for those that did for facilitating a 1:1 comparison against the launch data, I ran those HPC/server minded benchmarks to see how the performance now is with just the latest software upgrades compared to when the once-flagship EPYC 7773X processors first shipped.
