When it comes to high-performance computing (HPC), engineers can never get enough performance. Even minor improvements at the chip-level can have a dramatic financial impact in hyper-competitive industries such as computer-aided engineering (CAE) for manufacturing and electronic design automation (EDA).

With their respective x86 processor lineups, Intel and AMD continue to battle for bragging rights, leapfrogging one another in terms of absolute performance and price-performance. Both Intel and AMD provide a comprehensive set of processor SKUs optimized for various HPC workloads.

In March of 2021, AMD “upped the ante” with the introduction of their 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors. Dubbed as the world’s highest-performing server processor, AMD 7003 series processors deliver up to 19% more instructions per clock than the previous generation. The new “Zen 3” processor cores deliver industry-leading amounts of cache per core, a faster Infinity Fabric™, and industry-leading memory bandwidth of 3200 MT/sec across eight channels of DDR4 memory. HPC users are particularly interested in the recently announced 7xF3 high-frequency SKUs with a boost speed of up to 4.1 GHz.

In two recently published whitepapers sponsored by AMD, Cabot Partners looked at the latest AMD EPYC 7003 series processors (aka “Milan”) in HPE Apollo and HPE ProLiant server platforms, characterizing their performance for various CAE and EDA workloads. Among the headlines were that EPYC 7003 series processors deliver 36% better throughput and up to 60% more simultaneous simulations per server than previous 2nd Gen EPYC processors.

These performance gains benchmarked on the latest HPE servers make these processors worth a look. Readers can download the recently published whitepapers here:

• Realizing a more productive EDA environment: Improving the economics of semiconductor design with HPE Systems and AMD EPYC processors
• High-value CAE solutions for manufacturing: HPE Apollo Systems with AMD EPYC processors deliver HPC solutions that enhance product development and time-to-market