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by jaxtellerSoA 2785 days ago
Then it also stands to reason that it makes business sense to switch from Intel Xeon to AMD Epyc.
2 comments

Yes, it might; though, unlike memory, a processor is more than just a frequency/feature size and a TDP. A processor also has specialty instructions which workloads may have been optimized for.

I would expect that right now, Google is 1. seeing to the re-engineering of certain math libraries they use internally for Google Search et al, and 2. like AWS, intending to create separate cloud-VM instance classes for Intel vs. AMD processors, where each workload type can “pay its own bills.” If AMD continues to dominate in server TDP, then I would expect this to lead to the AMD instance classes getting cheaper while the Intel classes remain the same; and so most customers switching to AMD instances, save for the customers who themselves have workloads optimized for Xeon-specific SIMD instructions.

Care to link to processor efficiency benchmarks underlining your statement?
That page is most assuredly not comparing apples to apples. The isn't noted at all, it's more of a comparison on peak power usage, which you could maybe use to plan cooling, and a comment on idle power usage.

But you would need to compare total watts for enough systems to get the throughput you need, which I suspect is not the same and is likely workload dependent.

For home use, where you are likely to only have a single system, you can directly compare idle usage, but for Google how many idle systems depends on your thrroughput needs --- and maybe Google can orchestrate shutdown / reuse of idle servers off-peak, so it might be moot.

Not bench marks, but Amazon is saying their new R5a and M5a running on Eypc will offer 10 percent savings on compute costs.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/amazon-web-services-...