Stefan Mileschin

Large caches make it too sexy for Milan, Tokyo and Japan

Software King of the World has spilt the beans on Milan-X benchmarks to show the performance uplift that 3D V-Cache brings to the table.

Toms Hardware pointed out that Vole will tap into Milan-X to power its Azure HBv3 Series VMs, which are based on pair of EPYC 7V73X processors. Each processor devliers up to 64 Zen 3 cores for a total of 128 cores per server. However, eight cores from each server are reserved to feed the Azure hypervisor.

Microsoft offers its customers up to five configurations with different core counts: 120 cores, 96 cores, 64 cores, 32 cores and 16 cores. The EPYC 7V73X sports a peak clock speed up to 3.5 GHz.

According to Microsoft Milan-X features up to 768MB of L3 cache (L3 + 3D V-Cache) per chip so a dual-socket configuration delivers up to 1.5GB of L3 cache per system or in Microsoft's case, VM. Logically, the L3 allocation will depend on the setup.

For example, the 16-core VM has access to 96MB per core whereas the 32-core setup drops to 48MB per core. At any rate, Milan-X represents a 3x upgrade over current Milan chips or 6x improvement over the previous Rome processors.

The Azure HBv3's other hardware has not been changed. There is still 448GB of memory with a bandwidth of 350 GBps (measured with the STREAM TRIAD). Two 900GB NVMe SSDs provide high-speed storage with read and write speeds up to 6.9 GBps and 2.9 GBps, respectively, and a Mellanox ConnectX-6 NIC for 200 Gbps Ethernet connectivity.

https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardwar...n-x-benchmarks