Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > AMD > White Papers > Finish machine learning preparation tasks on Kubernetes containers in less time with the PowerEdge R7525 > Hardware cost and value: Get more performance for your dollar
To perform a fair comparison of these servers, we considered two options: configuring the servers to have similar hardware components or configuring them to have similar hardware cost. Because many companies have to follow a strict budget, we opted to configure the servers to match cost. After we built the HPE server, we found that we could outfit the Dell EMC server with some higher performing hardware components for around the same price. The two systems had comparable drives, RAM size, and network cards, but differed in power supplies, RAM speed, and CPU cores. The Dell EMC server had higher wattage power supplies (2,400W vs 800W), slightly faster RAM (3,200MHz vs 2,933MHz), and processors with a higher core count (32 vs. 18).
Figure 3 shows the list price for each server configuration.1, 2 Hardware costs fluctuate often, but at the time of this writing, the prices for the two servers we tested were similar, differing by just three percent.
Even though the prices are similar, the fact that the Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 processed 2.26 times the frames per second than the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 means it offered a better value in terms of hardware cost and image processing performance. Figure 4 illustrates this comparison. The Dell EMC server had a performance/ cost ratio of 0.128 FPS per dollar, while the HPE server’s ratio was only 0.055 FPS per dollar. Thus, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 offered 2.32 times the performance/cost ratio for our specific test case.
1 On February 25, 2020, Dell EMC sent us the list price for our configuration of the Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525.
2 On March 2, 2020, a certified HPE reseller sent us the list price for our configuration of the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10.