(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, along with the way that Dell has integrated this technology into its PowerEdge server lines. We're in for an interesting conversation today. Today, I'm joined by Dilip Ramachandran, Senior Director of Marketing at AMD, and Juergen Zimmermann. Juergen is Principal SAP Solutions Performance Benchmarking Engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Welcome. >> Thank you David, nice to be here. >> Nice to meet you too, welcome to theCUBE. You will officially be CUBE alumni after this. Dilip, let's start with you. What's this all about? Tell us about AMD's recent launch and the importance of it. >> Thanks, David. I'm excited to actually talk to you today, AMD, at our fourth generation EPYC launch last month in November. And as part of that fourth generation EPYC launch, we announced industry-leading performance based on 96 cores, based on Zen 4 architecture. And new interfaces, PCIe Gen 5, as well as DDR5. Incredible amount of memory bandwidth, memory capacity supported, and a whole lot of other features as well. So we announced this product, we launched it in November last month. And we've been closely working with Dell on a number of benchmarks that we'd love to talk to you more about today. >> So just for some context, when was the last release of this scale? So when was the third generation released? How long ago? >> The third generation EPYC was launched in Q1 of 2021. So it was almost 18 to 24 months ago. And since then we've made a tremendous jump, the fourth generation EPYC, in terms of number of cores. So third generation EPYC supported 64 cores, fourth generation EPYC supports 96 cores. And these are new cores, the Zen 4 cores, the fourth generation of Zen cores. So very high performance, new interfaces, and really world-class performance. >> Excellent. Well, we'll go into greater detail in a moment, but let's go to Juergen. Tell us about the testing that you've been involved with to kind of prove out the benefits of this new AMD architecture. >> Yeah, well, the testing is SAP Standard Performance benchmark, the SAP SD two tier. And this is more or less a industry standard benchmark that is used to size your service for the needs of SAP. Actually, SAP customers always ask the vendors about the SAP benchmark and the SAPS values of their service. >> And I should have asked you before, but give us a little bit of your background working with SAP. Have you been doing this for longer than a week? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely, I do this for about 20 years now. Started with Sun Microsystems, and interestingly in the year 2003, 2004, I started working with AMD service on SAP with Linux, and afterwards parted the SAP application to Solaris AMD, also with AMD. So I have a lot of tradition with SAP and AMD benchmarks, and doing this ever since then. >> So give us some more detail on the results of the recent testing, and if you can, tell us why we should care? >> (laughs) Okay, the recent results actually also surprised myself, they were so good. So I initially installed the benchmark kit, and couldn't believe that the server is just getting, or hitting idle by the numbers I saw. So I cranked up the numbers and reached results that are most likely double the last generation, so Zen 3 generation, and that even passed almost all 8-socket systems out there. So if you want to have the same SAP performance, you can just use 2-socket AMD server instead of any four or 8-socket servers out there. And this is a tremendous saving in energy. >> So you just mentioned savings in terms of power consumption, which is a huge consideration. What are the sort of end user results that this delivers in terms of real world performance? How is a human being at the end of a computer going to notice something like this? >> So actually the results are like that you get almost 150,000 users concurrently accessing the system, and get their results back from SAP within one second response time. >> 150,000 users, you said? >> 150,000 users in parallel. >> (laughs) Okay, that's amazing. And I think it's interesting to note that, and I'll probably say this a a couple of times. You just referenced third generation EPYC architecture, and there are a lot of folks out there who are two generations back. Not everyone is religiously updating every 18 months, and so for a fair number of SAP environments, this is an even more dramatic increase. Is that a fair thing to say? >> Yeah, I just looked up yesterday the numbers from generation one of EPYC, and this was at about 28,000 users. So we are five times the performance now, within four years. Yeah, great. >> So Dilip, let's dig a little more into the EPYC architecture, and I'm specifically also curious about... You mentioned PCIe Gen five, or 5.0 and all of the components that plug into that. You mentioned I think faster DDR. Talk about that. Talk about how all of the components work together to make when Dell comes out with a PowerEdge server, to make it so much more powerful. >> Absolutely. So just to spend a little bit more time on this particular benchmark, the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. It's a widely used benchmark in the industry to basically look at how do I get the most performance out of my system for a variety of SAP business suite applications. And we touched upon it earlier, right, we are able to beat a performance of 4-socket and 8-socket servers out there. And you know, it saves energy, it saves cost, better TCO for the data center. So we're really excited to be able to support more users in a single server and meeting all the other dual socket and 4-socket combinations out there. Now, how did we get there, right, is more the important question. So as part of our fourth generation EPYC, we obviously upgraded our CPU core to provide much better single third performance per core. And at the socket level, you know, when you're packing 96 cores, you need to be able to feed these cores, you know, from a memory standpoint. So what we did was we went to 12 channels of memory, and these are DDR5 memory channels. So obviously you get much better bandwidth, higher speed of the memory with DDR5, you know, starting at 4,800 megahertz. And you're also now able to have more channels to be able to send the data from the memory into the CPU subsystem, which is very critical to keep the CPUs busy and active, and get the performance out. So that's on the memory side. On the data side, you know, we do have PCIe Gen five, and any data oriented applications that take data either from the PCIe drives or the network cards that utilize Gen five that are available in the industry today, you can actually really get data into the system through the PCIe I/O, either again, through the disk, or through the net card as well. So those are other ways to actually also feed the CPU subsystem with data to be processed by the CPU complex. So we are, again, very excited to see all of this coming together, and as they say, proof's in the pudding. You know, Juergen talked about it. How over generation after generation we've increased the performance, and now with our fourth generation EPYC, we are absolutely leading world-class performance on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. >> Dilip, I have another question for you, and this may be, it may be a bit of a PowerEdge and beyond question. What are you seeing, or what are you anticipating in terms of end user perception when they go to buy a new server? Obviously server is a very loose term, and they can be configured in a bunch of different ways. But is there a discussion about ROI and TCO that's particularly critical? Because people are going to ask, "Well, wait a minute. If it's more expensive than the last one that I bought, am I getting enough bang for my buck?" Is that going to be part of the conversation, especially around power and cooling and things like that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, every data center decision maker has to ask the question, "Why should I upgrade? Should I stay with legacy hardware, or should I go into the latest and greatest that AMD offers?" And the advantages that the new generation products bring is much better performance at much better energy consumption levels, as well as much better performance per dollar levels. So when you do the upgrade, you are actually getting, you know, savings in terms of performance per dollar, as well as saving in space because you can consolidate your work into fewer servers 'cause you have more cores. As we talked about, you have eight, you know. Typically you might do it on a four or 8-socket server which is really expensive. You can consolidate down to a 2-socket server which is much cheaper. As also for maintenance costs, it's much lower maintenance costs as well. All of this, performance, power, maintenance costs, all of that translate into better TCO, right. So lower all of these, high performance, lower power, and then lower maintenance costs, translate to much better TCO for the end user. And that's an important equation that all customers pay attention to. and you know, we love to work with them and demonstrate those TCO benefits to them. >> Juergen, talk to us more in general about what Dell does from a PowerEdge perspective to make sure that Dell is delivering the best infrastructure possible for SAP. In general, I mean, I assume that this is a big responsibility of yours, is making sure that the stuff runs properly and if not, fixing it. So tell us about that relationship between Dell and a SAP. >> Yeah, for Dell and SAP actually, we're more or less partners with SAP. We have people sitting in SAP's Linux lab, and working in cooperative with SAP, also with Linux partners like SUSE and Red Hat. And we are in constant exchange about what's new in Linux, what's new on our side. And we're all a big family here. >> So when the new architecture comes out and they send it to Juergen, the boys back at the plant as they say, or the factory to use Formula One terms, are are waiting with baited breath to hear what Juergen says about the results. So just kind of kind of recap again, you know, the specific benchmarks that you were running. Tell us about that again. >> Yeah, the specific benchmark is the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. And for SAP, this is the benchmark that needs to be tested, and it shows the performance of the whole system. So in contrast to benchmarks that only check if the CPU is running, very good, this test the whole system up from the network stack, from the storage stack, the memory, subsystem, and the OS running on the CPUs. >> Okay, which makes perfect sense, since Dell is delivering an integrated system and not just CPU technology. You know, on that subject, Dilip, do you have any insights into performance numbers that you're hearing about with Gen four EPYC for other database environments? >> Yeah, we have actually worked together with Dell on a variety of benchmarks, both on the latest fourth generation EPYC processors as well as the preceding one, the third generation EPYC processors. And published a bunch of world records on database, particularly I would say TPC-H, TPCx-V, as well as TPCx-HS and TPCx-IoT. So a number of TPC related benchmarks that really showcase performance for database and related applications. And we've collaborated very closely with Dell on these benchmarks and published a number of them already, and you know, a number of them are world records as well. So again, we're very excited to collaborate with Dell on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark, as well as other benchmarks that are related to database. >> Well, speaking of other benchmarks, here at theCUBE we're going to be talking to actually quite a few people, looking at this fourth generation EPYC launch from a whole bunch of different angles. You two gentlemen have shed light on some really good pieces of that puzzle. I want to thank you for being on theCUBE today. With that, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us here on theCUBE. Stay tuned for continuing CUBE coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, and Dell PowerEdge strategy to leverage it.