Memory Performance of AMD EPYC Rome and Intel Cascade Lake SP Server Processors

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Abstract

Modern processors, in particular within the server segment, integrate more cores with each generation. This increases their complexity in general, and that of the memory hierarchy in particular. Software executed on such processors can suffer from performance degradation when data is distributed disadvantageously over the available resources. To optimize data placement and access patterns, an in-depth analysis of the processor design and its implications for performance is necessary. This paper describes and experimentally evaluates the memory hierarchy of AMD EPYC Rome and Intel Xeon Cascade Lake SP server processors in detail. Their distinct microarchitectures cause different performance patterns for memory latencies, in particular for remote cache accesses. Our findings illustrate the complex NUMA properties and how data placement and cache coherence states impact access latencies to local and remote locations. This paper also compares theoretical and effective bandwidths for accessing data at the different memory levels and main memory bandwidth saturation at reduced core counts. The presented insight is a foundation for modeling performance of the given microarchitectures, which enables practical performance engineering of complex applications. Moreover, security research on side-channel attacks can also leverage the presented findings.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICPE 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering
Pages165–175
Number of pages11
ISBN (electronic)9781450391436
Publication statusPublished - 9 Apr 2022
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85128652028
Mendeley ff193789-b072-3738-a096-7141bda87960
dblp conf/wosp/VeltenSIH22
WOS 000883411400019
ORCID /0000-0002-8491-770X/work/141543305
ORCID /0000-0002-2730-0308/work/142245960
ORCID /0009-0003-0666-4166/work/151475605
ORCID /0000-0002-5437-3887/work/154740524

Keywords

Keywords

  • amd zen 2, cache coherence, amd epyc rome, memory hierarchy, intel xeon skylake, intel xeon cascade lake, AMD EPYC Rome, Intel Xeon Cascade Lake, AMD Zen 2, Intel Xeon Skylake