I'm fairly tickled by the fact that the extra L2 and 512b unit was just stapled right onto the base Skylake core.
It's not just "stapled". Because if you look at the cores, they are rectangular. Adding units would require the CPU floorplan to change to keep the rectangular shape. I'd like to at least acknowledge the engineering work required for that. The changes are actually significant.
Much better dual socket c-ray and NAMD results relative to dual E5-2699 v4 compared to Anandtech's results, but why though?
Tomshardware results are better too.
I see two reasons. Johan, personally favors AMD. Now, proper journalism dictates you be 100% fair. But as human beings, we aren't 100% neutral. We do lean based on our inclinations and past experiences. So he does say in his review he uses applications and OS settings that would seem "typical" to an enterprise user. You need to make sure you aren't biased in any way. You can't favor AMD because Intel is the monopoly and AMD was shown in a worse light by others. It needs to be fair for both.
My analysis is that he made a wrong conclusion. You cannot, as a review consisting of often less than a dozen benchmark out of thousands, or tens of thousands usage cases perfectly represent the server market. Whether the server adminstrator decides to do due diligence to have it performing it as much or leave it as it came is entirely up to them. As a reviewer you should use the best case scenario for each platform because of this. The administrators would try their best in reaching maximum performance allowed within their budget and time.
I've seen another person pointing out that by not using the latest distro in Johan's review it underrates EPYC by not taking advantage of the IF differences.
The only way to quash most of those claims is to show EPYC AND Xeon Scalable in the best light.
Another reason compounds the first problem. Actually the two feeds into each other. He says he didn't have enough time. Yes, I do feel they raised the price of Skylake-SP too much. Yes I don't think its entirely right that you need Platinum to get max 2P performance. Yes, I don't like the branding and segmentation. The previous branding was logical. But do I feel the way Johan made his review could have been done better? Yes, definitely.