The latest benchmarks for Intel’s Ice Lake-SP Xeon family of next-generation server CPUs have been filtered and show some interesting results compared to AMD’s current generation EPYC Rome CPU.
Intel Ice Lake-SP performance tests compared to the EPYC 7742
As part of the Whitley platform, the Intel Ice Lake SP CPU line will consist of multiple Xeon chips. We’ve already seen a few of these, but the last one is a 28-core piece and was seen in the Geekbench and SiSoftware database.
The Intel Ice Lake SP CPU has been tested on a dual-socket server and has two of the chips. Each chip has 28 cores and 56 threads, rounding up to a total of 56 cores and 112 threads. Because the chip is still an early technical pattern, it has lower clock frequencies of 1.5 GHz base and incremental clock frequencies of up to 3.20 GHz. The CPU has 42 MB L3 and 35 MB L2 cache for a total of 77 MB cache. The 2S Ice Lake SP server was equipped with 512 GB memory at 3200 MHz and is presented in an 8-channel configuration, which is one of the highlights of the new Whitley platform.
The performance of the Intel Ice Lake SP 2S server was evaluated at Geekbench 4, which benefits from the AVX-512 instruction set of Intel’s current and future Xeon CPU families. In single-core tests, the server scored up to 3443 points and in multi-core tests, the chip scored up to 37317 points.
The comparison with the AMD EPYC 7742, should take some things into account, the Intel parts are technical samples and will have higher clock rates in the final versions, so the performance will be higher. Intel CPUs also benefit in this benchmark from their AVX-512 instruction set, which AMD CPUs lack.
We have a single EPYC 7742 processor for a total of 64 cores and 128 threads from AMD versus 56 cores and 112 threads from Intel that combine the two Ice Lake SP chips. The AMD EPYC 7742 CPU easily outperforms Intel’s chips in single-core tests due to the higher basic clock speed of 3.4GHz vs. 1.5GHz for Intel’s components. At the same time, the AMD platform delivers about 35,000 multi-core points, which is slightly less than Intel’s Ice Lake SP parts. With the final clock speeds, Ice Lake SP CPUs can easily outperform AMD EPYC Rom parts, but the benefit may not be as great.
The success of Ice Lake-SP will depend on how quickly they are brought to the market. AMD has already planned its Milan EPYC processors for the Zen 3 architecture by the end of this year, which will not make it easy for Intel in the server market.