Keysight Technologies, Inc. has used the 4th generation AMD EPYC™ CPUs from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. to develop an industry-first benchmarking methodology. Particularly, the approach redefines the landscape of system performance evaluation for high-speed digital designers, network equipment manufacturers, and data center operators. 

The deployment of mobile and 5G private networks will likely grow rapidly across many industries. Specifically, as companies adopt automation and digital transformation strategy. This diverse set of industry use cases requires a versatile compute architecture. Especially, in supporting millions of low-latency, high-bandwidth devices, and a multifaceted workload profile. Given this transformation, comprehensive infrastructure benchmarking is critical to ensure optimal performance across a spectrum of industry use cases.

To provide more realistic performance benchmarks, Keysight in collaboration with AMD developed an integrated test case methodology that considers the processing power of central processing units (CPUs). Using realistic traffic emulation, this novel approach enables data center operators to extract more performance from a chosen CPU. Thereafter, characterize the performance across multiple vectors while adhering to bandwidth requirements.

Moreover, the methodology deploys Keysight’s software tools onto AMD EPYC™ processors to conduct staged test cases with realistic traffic at scale.

Methodology Details

Highlights of the test case methodology include infrastructure scalability. Here, smooth and reliable operation requires handling millions of concurrent devices. Traditional benchmarks frequently overlook the CPU’s capacity and its capability to handle a considerably higher concurrent load. This as the network’s bandwidth constraints obscure this ability. This new benchmarking approach can uncover the true CPU power and scalability in these environments.

Next, is real-life authenticity. Mobile and 5G private networks support specialized fields like vision-based smart manufacturing, extended reality (XR) viewership, and retail workflows. Testing infrastructure for its capability to handle realistic application, voice, and video traffic is crucial.

Thus, the new benchmark emphasizes replicating bulk activities with millions of devices establishing new sessions. Moreover, it includes highly realistic scenarios like subscribers initiating voice, video, and web calls. This insight into
real-world capabilities empowers data center operators to provision their
infrastructures accurately.

Raghu Nambiar, Corporate Vice President, Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions, AMD, said,”Our collaboration with Keysight demonstrates the ability of AMD EPYC CPUs to deliver impressive parallel processing performance to handle these high volumes of data traffic.”

Meanwhile, Ram Periakaruppan, Vice President and General Manager, Network Test & Security Solutions, Keysight said: “Single dimension benchmarking methodologies like throughput is insufficient for data center operators. Particularly, in properly designing and deploying their compute infrastructure.” For that reason, Periakaruppan said new performance benchmarking is necessary in the modern mobile and 5G private networks. When used, it highlights the prowess of the AMD ‘Zen 4’ chiplet architecture to meet complex demands in those networks.