Performance by CPU Architecture
If you saw our recent More Cores More Better AMD Arm and Intel Server CPUs in 2022-2023 piece, or our pieces like the Supermicro ARS-210ME-FNR Ampere Altra Max Arm Server Review, Huawei HiSilicon Kunpeng 920 Arm Server piece, you may have seen that we have been expanding our testbeds to include more architectures. This is in addition to the Ampere Altra 80 core CPUs that are from the family used by Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. We also managed to test these on the newest generation AMD EPYC Bergamo and Genoa-X SKUs.
Here is the zoomed-in non-zero scale version of the chart:
We noted a similar pattern on all of these drives with the Intel Xeon W-3400 series and the W-2400 series as we saw on the Sapphire Rapids parts, which makes sense given they are the same underlying chips. One slight difference is that we saw the top-end 56-core Intel Xeon w9-3495X in the Falcon Northwest server/ workstation performed better when it was in its full 1.5kW performance mode. Since that is a specialty platform, we are going to leave it out for now but you can learn more about the platform here.
One may also note that not only is this our second SSD review with AMD EPYC Bergamo and Genoa-X, but we also snuck an Intel Xeon Max 9480 figure in there. Expect a review and video for those CPUs in the next week or two.
Final Words
The Micron 6500 ION was a drive we had initially approached with caution. We thought the SSD was going to be an enormous step down, albeit at the same capacity, compared to the Micron 9400 Pro. Once we started testing the drive, that is thankfully not the case. The Micron 9400 Pro is faster to be clear. Still, the Micron 6500 ION may be focused on capacity but it is not a sell-out effort completely sacrificing performance. This is a good balance.
Still, this is a large capacity SSD with a major focus: displacing hard drives in data centers. For the large number of servers that have fast AI or video accelerators and need fast storage capacity in-node, the Micron 6500 ION is a great drive.
Does page 2 contain a left-over cloned heading from an earlier review?
Solidigm D5-P5430 15.36TB Performance
Yeah, the E1.S and U.3 have a slight speed and throughput benefit over m.2 NVMe, but the fact that QLC is advertised for servers is abominable. I wouldn’t even put TLC in one. I don’t know, can’t people do simple math anymore?
My first experience with QLC was with a pair of Solidigm P41 Plus drives. I figured the heritage of the parentage would count for something. It did not. Drives were returned. So inconsistent they might as well have been faulty.
@namer
As a server admin I would happily use these as the capacity drives in a vSAN array. TLC are just fine as well. In fact aot of the top drives in servers are TCL. You just have to look at use case and go from there.
Na
Ok tcl
Ummm