Do Customers Benefit from Intel® In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (Intel® IAA), and at What Cost?

In testing by Prowess Consulting, an “out-of-box” configuration built with AMD EPYC™ processors offered high performance and efficiency for a database workload with far less configuration complexity than an Intel^® processor–powered system using Intel^® In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (Intel IAA^®). For example, our engineers were unable to configure ClickHouse to make use of Intel IAA for testing despite hours spent trying to resolve numerous errors, compiler version issues, and other hurdles. No special configurations were required to benefit from the higher core count in the AMD EPYC–processor powered system. In addition, our testing with a RocksDB workload demonstrated higher performance and a higher performance per watt from the AMD processor–powered system, compared to an Intel processor–based system using four instances of Intel IAA. Finally, the AMD EPYC 9734 processor has a 43% lower manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) than the Intel^® Xeon^® Platinum 8490H processor, making the AMD option a compelling prospect for businesses looking to achieve optimum efficiency and price/performance for their analytics and in-memory database (IMDB) workloads, without the added administrative burden required by Intel IAA.