AMD’s Upcoming EPYC 9654 Tears Apart Every Other Chip, L3 Cache Over 9 Times Faster Than Its Xeon Counterpart

By Abdullah FaisalJuly 19, 2022

2 minutes read

AMD, which is gunning to gain the upper hand over Intel in the server segment of CPUs is about to unleash a beast—the EPYC 9654—which is faster than any x86 ISA based chip in the market. Just a few days ago, a couple of benchmarks were leaked. Team Red is expected to release its Zen 4 based server SKUs sometime this year.

The EPYC 9654 features a mind blowing 96 cores and 192 threads based on AMD’s new architecture. This chip contains 384 MB of L3 cache while running at a base frequency of 2.15 GHz. The boost frequencies are rated at about 3.05 GHz for all cores. Power consumption is around 360W, which is decent as Intel’s best server chips are rated at about 700W of power.

@yuuki_ans on Twitter shared the cache and latency figures for both Intel’s upcoming Xeon Platinum 8480+ ‘Sapphire Rapids-SP’ and AMD’s EPYC 9654 ‘Genoa‘ chip.

AMD Genoa EPYC 9654
96Core/192Thread TDP 360w
2.0GHz – 2.15GHz – 3.7GHz
（The ES processor that was tested yesterday）
—–
AMD Genoa EPYC 9664
？Core/？Thread TDP 400w
（Unknown frequency） pic.twitter.com/X9dLHvd2pN
— 结城安穗-YuuKi_AnS🍥 (@yuuki_ans) July 19, 2022

The EPYC 9654 was tested in a dual socket configuration, having a base clock of around 2.0 GHz and a boost clock which varied between 2.15 GHz and 3.7 GHz. Bear in mind, this is just an Engineering Sample so the actual chip on release will have much better performance and increased efficiency.

As stated above, this chip carries 384 MB of L3 cache, whereas the L2 cache is around 96 MB or 1 MB per each core. So in total, we can expect upto 480 MB of cache (384MB of L3 Cache + 96MB of L2 Cache).

In the performance category, the chip delivers a breathtaking 30 TB/s of L1 cache bandwidth which is 2x higher than the AMD’s previous Milan-X SKU (14 TB/s) and a 17% increment over Intel’s latest Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon (26 TB/s).

In L2 cache testing, the EPYC 9654 features a bandwidth of about 20 TB/s crushing the competition as it is over 2.44x faster than its Intel counterpart (8 TB/s). To make matters much more worse for Intel, this beast from AMD has a L3 cache bandwidth of 10 TB/s which is a mind-boggling 9x faster than its competitor (1.1 TB/s), putting the final nail in the coffin for Intel.

Such high memory bandwidth has never been seen before and to think that this is just an Engineering Sample, Intel really needs to keep an eye out and step up its game before it is too late.

The AMD EPYC 9654 and Intel Sapphire Rapids-SP were both tested with DDR5-4800 MHz memory for latency tests and as expected AMD’s new CPU delivers the lowest system latency. The largest disparity comes in the L3 cache, where AMD’s upcoming SKU is 65% faster than Intel.

Comparison chart showing the EPYC 9654 vs. Intel’s flagship Sapphire Rapids chip | Wccftech

These results are promising and show the power than Zen 4 can offer. An interesting discrepancy is that AMD’s upcoming Zen 4 CPUs for the average consumer lag behind Intel’s Raptor Lake however the same architecture crushes Intel in the server department.