Overclocked AMD EPYC Rome 7742 dual socket tops Corona bench, beating Intel Xeon Platinum 8280L setup by 10 percent

A user over on the Chinese ChipHell forums managed to overclock a dual socket AMD EPYC Rome 7742 server setup to 3.8 GHz. The monster configuration topped the Corona CPU benchmark, rendering over 48 million rays per second. This put the EPYC Rome 7742 system ahead of the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280L by over 3 million rays per second. 

The user apparently used a rare EPYC Rome 7742 engineering sample to accomplish this feat, running it on an unspecified Foxconn socket SP3 motherboard, paired with 512 GB of system memory. 

While there are consumer solutions like the 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X that should deliver superior performance, especially when overclocked past the 4 GHz mark, this result is interesting because of the gains AMD's server parts have made in recent years in the enterprise sector. 

AMD's chiplet approach to CPU design means that Ryzen, Threadripper, and EPYC CPUs scale linearly with price. Intel's monolithic design means that its own processors cost exponentially more as core count increases. Reports indicate that Intel's steep price cuts on both consumer and server CPUs are part its strategy to contain AMD's cost-advantage by taking a loss in the short to medium term. Regardless, if AMD's EPYC Genoa and EPYC Milan designs offer superior performance for less, enterprise clients like Netflix might decide to jump ship.