Keysight leverages AMD's CPU processing capabilities to provide real-world performance benchmarks.

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS), a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, today announced it is leveraging AMD's 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs to develop an industry-first benchmarking methodology that redefines system performance evaluation for high-speed digital designers, network equipment manufacturers and data center operators.

With the recent digital transformation driving rapid deployment of mobile and 5G networks across industries, the need for multi-purpose computing architectures is growing. Keysight stated, "Considering this, comprehensive infrastructure benchmarking is crucial to ensure optimal performance across the spectrum of industrial use cases."

Keysight and AMD have developed an integrated test case methodology that considers the processing capabilities of central processing units (CPUs) to provide more realistic performance benchmarks. This new approach, utilizing realistic traffic emulation, allows data center operators to extract more performance from their chosen CPUs and characterize performance across multiple vectors while meeting bandwidth requirements. This methodology was developed by deploying Keysight's software tools on AMD DPYC™ processors to perform planned test cases using realistic, large-scale traffic.

Environments like smart grids and smart manufacturing require the simultaneous processing of millions of devices to ensure smooth and reliable operation. Traditional benchmarks often overlook CPU capacity and the ability of a CPU to handle significant loads simultaneously, but network bandwidth constraints make these metrics difficult to assess. This new benchmarking approach is designed to accurately reveal CPU capacity and scalability in these environments.

Mobile and 5G private networks also support specialized applications such as vision-based smart manufacturing, extended reality (XR) viewing, and retail workflows. Testing the infrastructure's ability to handle realistic applications, voice, and video traffic is crucial. The new benchmark focuses on replicating the massive activity of millions of devices creating new sessions, including highly realistic scenarios such as subscribers initiating voice, video, and web calls. Data center operators can leverage these real-world capabilities to accurately provision their infrastructure.

“5G mobile network operators around the world are facing unprecedented bandwidth demands,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, Data Center Ecosystem and Solutions, AMD. “As data traffic volumes continue to grow, scalable and efficient benchmarking solutions are needed to accurately measure user experience. AMD said in a statement that its collaboration with Keysight demonstrates the exceptional capabilities of AMD EPYC CPUs, which deliver incredible parallel processing performance to handle this massive data traffic.

“Data center operators cannot properly design and deploy their computing infrastructure using linear benchmarking methodologies such as throughput,” said Ram Periakaruppan, vice president and general manager of Keysight’s network test and security solutions business. “Modern mobile and 5G private networks require a new approach to performance benchmarking. This approach demonstrates the superior ability of the AMD ‘Zen 4’ chipset architecture to meet the complex demands of these networks.”