AMD Instinct MI300A data center APU underperforms against mainstream CPUs in Geekbench — MI300A submissions show lower performance than a Core i5-14600K

I don't know how many times this has to be said but posting Geekbench results for data center hardware is utterly useless.

What's the sense of this article ?
Maybe it is a prototype.
Maybe not well cooled.
Unknown motherboard type.
Maybe software have incompatibility.
Variability of results indicate serious issues in the benchmarking.
Geekbench is hardly the aimed workflow of these chips, so the value of geekbench results is questionable, also if results are very good.

NinoPino said:

What's the sense of this article ?
Maybe it is a prototype.
Maybe not well cooled.
Unknown motherboard type.
Maybe software have incompatibility.
Variability of results indicate serious issues in the benchmarking.
Geekbench is hardly the aimed workflow of these chips, so the value of geekbench results is questionable, also if results are very good.

About the only use for Geekbench in a data center chip is to test that it completes the benchmark if it is an early silicon.

A prototype of a new-generation data center APU didn't perform up to par in its first run of a standard CPU benchmark? I'm sorry, but that really doesn't tell us much about how the final product will perform in its intended role.

The integrated AI-GPU, NPU, or whatever AMD's brand of AI-accelerators is called, provides a significant part of the value of these chips, hence them being an entirely separate processor line from their server CPUs.

Sidenote: the industry really need to decide on a standardized, non-copyrighted generic name for these things - Intel calls them NPUs, my home server runs a couple of discrete Google Coral TPUs, I'm guessing Qualcomm probably has their own name for them... It's a mess. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is to advertise their performance using OPS (TOPS, POPS, etc), the same kind of seemingly but not really useful measure for comparison as FLOPS continue to be for GPUs.

Anyway, these things are trying to balance multi core processing power with power consumption, *and* have an additional powerful integrated secondary AI processor onboard, so, comparing benchmarks with consumer CPUs, or workstation CPUs like the Threadrippers that are designed around maximizing all-around single-processor performance with minimal consideration to power consumption, is kind of an 'apples to bananas to cumquats' comparison, even if this were a production chip.

These numbers obviously don't look good, but the benchmarking tool they are coming from also hasn't been updated for these processors, nor accounts for them being special-purpose APUs. So they are numbers resulting from running an uncalibrated tool on a prototype of a specialized processor.

We know AMD can make killer processors, the article even compared it to one. I feel like it's more than a little early to call them out on this one based on this information alone.

But, then again, I'm hardly objective when it comes to AMD - I invested fairly heavily in them (as well as less but still significantly in Nvidia and Intel... and pretty much the entire industry chain down from ASML up to Supermicro) earlier this year, when everything was all sunshine and lollipops for AMD/Nvidia, and it looked like Intel had gone as low as it was going to, and headed for better days. Needless to say, things have looked more than a little rough in the semiconductor industry this latter half of the year, and, with around 10% of my portfolio directly invested there, not counting double-dips through ETFs, it would make me very happy to see AMD's fancy new toy do well. Make of that what you will.