AMD EPYC Powered HPE Server Breaks Two World Records In SPEC CPU Performance Benchmark

Nov 21, 2017

AMD is making waves with its brand new "EPYC" enterprise chips which debuted earlier this year. Enterprise giants including Dell & HP, have been running AMD's new chips through their paces and are on track to roll out new servers powered by the company's EPYC processors before year's end and into Q1 of next year.

AMD EPYC Powered HPE Server Breaks Performance World Records In SPEC CPU Benchmark

Yesterday HPE, the enterprise arm of HP, announced that its brand new ProLiant DL385 Gen10 systems have broken two performance world records in the SPECrate®2017_fp_base and SPECfp®_rate2006 benchmarks.

NVIDIA & AMD Graphics Card Prices Drop by up to 18% Across the Board

The DL385 is a dual processor, 2U rackmount chassis with 24 drive bays which means that thanks to EPYC, it can scale to up to 64 Zen cores and 128 threads as well as have access to 4 terabytes of DDR4 memory and 128 PCIe lanes. In terms of storage and I/O the chassis is capable of powering 24 NVMe SSDs or 30 x 2.5-inch SATA SSDs as well as 3 dual-slot or 5 single slot GPUs

The new EPYC powered DL385 systems should see availability starting in December.

Full Press Release by AMD

AMD EPYC-powered HPE DL385 makes powerful industry waves with 50 percent lower cost per virtual machine

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Nov. 20, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced that the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) ProLiant DL385 Gen10 server, powered by AMD EPYC™ processors set world records in both SPECrate®2017_fp_base and SPECfp®_rate2006. The secure and flexible 2P 2U HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Server joins the HPE Cloudline CL3150 server in featuring AMD EPYC processors. With designs ranging from 8-core to 32-core, AMD EPYC delivers industry-leading memory bandwidth across the HPE line-up, with eight channels of memory and unprecedented support for integrated, high-speed I/O with 128 lanes of PCIe® 3 on every EPYC processor.

“HPE is joining with AMD today to extend the world’s most secure industry standard server portfolio to include the AMD EPYC processor. We now give customers another option to optimize performance and security for today’s virtualized workloads,” said Justin Hotard, vice president and GM, Volume Global Business Unit, HPE. “The HPE ProLiant DL385 featuring the AMD EPYC processor is the result of a long-standing technology engagement with AMD and a shared belief in continuing innovation.”

AMD EPYC Leadership Cost-per-VM Server Configurations
The performance of AMD EPYC is delivered by up to 64-cores in the HPE DL385 2P server configuration and access to 4 terabytes of memory and 128 lanes of PCIe connectivity. The combination of core-count and features attains up to 50 percent lower cost per virtual machine (VM) HPE sees over traditional server solutions.

AMD EPYC-powered HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 World Record Floating Point Performance

An AMD EPYC model 7601-based HPE DL385 Gen10 system scored 257 on SPECrate®2017_fp_base, higher than any other two socket system score published by SPEC®.¹
An AMD EPYC model 7601-based HPE DL385 Gen10 system scored 1980 on SPECfp®_rate2006, higher than any other two socket system score published by SPEC®.²

“The HPE DL385 positions the AMD EPYC processor right in the heart of the high-volume market where dual-socket servers are frequently deployed by service providers, large enterprises and small-to-medium size businesses,” said Matt Eastwood, senior vice president, enterprise, datacenter and cloud infrastructure, IDC. “With its combination of high-performance cores, memory bandwidth and PCIe connectivity options it is an attractive choice to address a wide range of business applications and workloads.”

AMD Secure Processor
Every EPYC processor integrates hardware based security. The ProLiant DL385 delivers unmatched security via the HPE Silicon Root of Trust enabling only validated firmware to run. The HPE Silicon Root of Trust is linked to the AMD Secure Processor in the AMD EPYC SoC for firmware validation before the server boots.

The AMD Secure Processor and HPE DL385 also enables:

Secure Encrypted Memory − All the memory or a portion of the memory can be encrypted to protect data against memory hacks and scrapes.
Secure Encrypted Virtualization − VMs have separate encryption keys as does the hypervisor, isolating the VMs from one another and from the hypervisor itself.

“AMD is proud to deliver to HPE a superb balance of high-performance cores, memory, and I/O for optimal performance with AMD EPYC,” said Scott Aylor, Corporate VP and GM Enterprise Business Unit at Advanced Micro Devices. “With AMD EPYC the HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 can support more virtual machines per server, process more data in parallel, directly access more local storage, while more securely protecting data in memory.”

Availability
The HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 server with AMD EPYC will be available in December 2017.