AMD 3rd Gen EPYC Milan review: a peak vs per core performance balance

From a competitive standpoint, Milan continues to strengthen and maintain a very stark one-sided performance advantage against its biggest competitor, Intel. Rome had already offered more raw socket performance than the best Intel had to offer at the time, and the gap is currently quite large as Intel has not updated in that time. Intel has stated that its Ice Lake Xeon-SP family will come sometime soon, however unless Intel manages to close the core count gap, then AMD looks to be in very good shape.

Meanwhile, as AMD is focused on Intel, the Arm competition has also entered the market with force through 2020, and designs such as the Ampere Altra are able to outperform the new top Milan SKUs in many throughput-bound workloads. AMD still has very clear advantages, such as much superior memory performance through huge caches, or vastly superior per-thread performance with specialised dedicated SKUs. Still, it leaves AMD in a spot as they can't claim to be the outright performance leader under every scenario, and offers another generational target to consider as it develops future cores.

Another monstrous CPU by AMD, and another case where Intel simply doesn't even come close. There's offerings on the ARM front, though, that are slowly starting to make their way into the data centre.