This blog describes why AMD Ryzen™ 9 processors in servers are ideal for critical financial workloads, discusses the Strategic Technology Analysis Center (STAC®) and the STAC-N1 benchmark, and then describes the systems tested and the results of those tests.
About STAC and the STAC-N1 Benchmark
STAC facilitates the STAC Benchmark™ Council of leading financial institutions and technology vendors that specifies standard ways to assess technologies used in finance. The STAC Benchmark Council created the STAC-N1 benchmarks to measure how network stacks perform in a simulated market data environment.
The STAC-N1 benchmark uses common financial services workloads in a vendor-neutral manner across many network APIs without the need for additional applications such as middleware or exchange feed handlers. STAC-N1 results demonstrate a system’s low-latency capabilities. This is of special importance to the Financial Services Industry (FSI) that relies on high-frequency trading applications where even fractions of a second of latency can impact profits. The STAC-N1 benchmark provides a level of automated testing and analysis and returns a detailed latency analysis along with throughput, CPU, and memory statistics.
AMD RyzenTM 9 7950X Processors are Ideal for the Financial Services Industry
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processors based on the “Zen 4” architecture deliver record performance for critical workloads, thanks to features such as:
- Up to 16 physical cores and up to 32 threads per processor
- Maximum CPU boost clock of up to 5.7 GHz
- Support for up to 128GB of DDR5-5200 MT/s DRAM
- 2x PCIe® 5.0 x16 (FHHL) slots (16/NA or 8/8)
The features deliver the high performance that makes AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processors both ideal for the FSI market and especially well-suited for the HFT use-case where an advantage of even a few microseconds can reap millions of dollars of profit.
Test Configuration
STAC tested the following configuration and published the results in the STAC Report (SUT ID AMD231005) for STAC-N1:
- Platforms: Two 1P Supermicro® Mainstream A+ Server AS -2015A-TR
- CPU: 16-core AMD Ryzen 7950X with 64MiB L3 cache @4.5GHz (5.7GHz boost)[1]
- Memory: 2 x 32GiB DDR5 DIMMs @ 4800 MT/s
- Networking: AMD Xilinx XtremeScale™ X2522-25G-PLUS25 GbE adapters using AMD Xilinx OpenOnload® 8.1.1.17
- Interconnect: One switchless (point-to-point) 25GbE cross-connect cable with Forward Error Correction (FEC) disabled connected the two servers.
- OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2®
AMD Ryzen 9 Processors Continue Stacking Up
The configuration described above demonstrated excellent UDP performance by showing the following characteristics compared to all publicly disclosed STAC-N1 results to date that use UDP:
- The lowest mean, median, 99 percentile, and maximum latency for the base rate of 100k messages per second (STAC.N1.β1.PINGPONG.LAT1)
- The highest maximum throughput tested of 1.6 million messages per second (STAC.N1.β1.PINGPONG.TPUT1)
- The lowest mean (1.8µs), median, 99 percentile, and maximum (7µs) SupplyToReceive latency observed at the highest rate tested (STAC.N1.β1.PINGPONG.LAT2)
- The lowest mean, median, 99 percentile, and maximum SendToReceive latency observed at the highest rate tested (STAC.N1.β1.PINGPONG.LAT3)
These results were showcased at the STAC Summit in New York on October 19, 2023. You can view the summary of the results here. Premium STAC subscribers can obtain additional details about these impressive results.
The STAC-N1 benchmark requires fewer than half the cores of an AMD Ryzen 7950X processor, leaving the remaining cores available to concurrently run another application in a production environment.
Milind Damle is Sr. Director in the Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions team at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies, or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
REFERENCE
- For AMD Ryzen processors, the boost frequency is the maximum frequency achievable by any single core on the processor under normal operating conditions for server systems.
“STAC” and all STAC names are trademarks or registered trademarks of the Strategic Technology Analysis Center, LLC.
