Goodbye Intel, Hello AMD.
As part of ongoing efforts to increase the performance of the services we provide to customers, we started evaluating the AMD Ryzen 9 7000 CPUs in a server environment at the start of Q3 2023.
Following much trialling, learning, and some errors along the way, we decided to go forward with using AMD Ryzen 9 CPU’s as our primary server configuration for all of our services (excluding custom-ordered services).
The usage of AMD Ryzen CPU’s in server environments grew sharply in March 2019, primarily under an ASRock Rack configuration.
Server Efficiency
Balancing high-performance with eco-friendliness is a difficult task for a company with high performance computing as a primary goal.
As part of our hardware refresh in Q4 2023, we evaluated different server configurations and found that the servers equipped with the AMD Ryzen 9 7000 processors offer the highest performance-per-watt possible.
Our previous servers were based on the Intel Xeon E-2388G CPU (8cores / 16threads with up to 5.10GHz turbo) and found they used an average of 200w/hour per server!
Our new Ryzen servers with identical work tasks consume an average 90w/hour.
That’s an immediate 55% decrease in power usage with an average 20% faster single-threaded performance and 50% higher multi-core performance – as well as having more cores & threads available to be able to put more work through the same server.
The graph below show a real-world migration of moving virtual machines from 1 hypervisor (E-2388G – light) to another (Ryzen 7900 – dark).
You can find our Ecologi profile here. Our impact and commitments are updated quarterly pending review of eligible services.