Intel's Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon Platinum CPUs that leaked out yesterday have now been tested in a range of benchmarks but fail to impress when compared to AMD's EPYC & even older Intel Xeon chips.

Intel Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon Platinum ES CPUs Tested In Dual Socket Configuration, Lackluster Performance So Far Against AMD's EPYC CPUs

In yesterday's leak, we reported how the latest Intel Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon Platinum CPUs in ES state consume 350W of power at PL1 and 420W of power at PL2 limits. The CPU itself, which is a Xeon Platinum 8476 or Xeon Platinum 8480, is a 56 core part with 112 threads based on the Golden Cove core architecture, & and comes with 112 MB of L2 & 105 MB of L3 cache, and features clock speeds of up to 3.7 GHz (3.3 GHz all-core). Now, these aren't the final clocks but the power figures are definitely worrisome for Intel's upcoming part.

Yuuki_Ans has now provided benchmarks for the same Intel Sapphire Rapids-SP ES CPU against Intel's Cascade Lake Xeon 8280L (8S Config), Ice Lake Xeon 8380 (2S Config), EPYC 7763 (2P config), and EPYC 7773X (2P config). The Sapphire Rapids-SP chips were also running a dual-socket config with 64 GB of DDR5-4800 memory. The rest of the platforms were running DDR4 platforms at the max specs that the platforms can support, respectively.

Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids-SP ES CPU has been tested in various benchmarks. (Image Credits: Yuuki_Ans)

As for the benchmarks, In single-core, the Intel Sapphire Rapids-SP CPU did show a little boost over the Ice Lake-SP chips but was beaten by AMD's EPYC Milan parts in 4 out of 6 benchmarks. Despite the new Golden Cove architecture, the CPU was only able to match the Zen 3 server chips in 1T CPU benches. In multi-threaded benchmarks, the AMD EPYC Milan lineup destroyed the Intel Sapphire Rapids-SP chips outright. Just for comparison's sake, in CPU-z, the AMD EPYC Milan CPU ran at up to 2.3x faster performance than the unreleased Intel chip.

Intel Sapphire Rapids-SP 56 Cores (2S) vs AMD EPYC Milan 64 Cores (2P) MT Benchmarks

EPYC 7763 (2P)

EPYC 7773X (2P)

Sapphire Rapids-SP (2S)

0

16667

33334

50001

66668

83335

100002

0

16667

33334

50001

66668

83335

100002

CPU-z V17 67.1k

65.2k

29.1k

CPU-z V19 20.7k

20.4k

15.1k

CBR15 12.9k

12.3k

8.8k

CBR20 37.4k

36.1k

27.6k

CBR23 98.1k

96.4k

68.2k

Vray 79.5k

83.2k

66.9k

Interestingly, the CPU does deliver much higher performance in the CPU-z AVX-512 tests but we know that AVX-512 makes the CPU consume way more power and that could lead to power figures nearing the 700-750W BIOS limit. This is also why the AVX-512 clock speeds are rated much lower due to their intensity on each individual core. AVX-512 has been used in the past by Intel to inflate their benchmark numbers and while there are certain HPC workloads where the tech is useful, it isn't widely adopted and as such, non-AVX-512 workloads will benefit from standard core compute performance more.

Intel Sapphire Rapids-SP 56 Cores (2S) vs Intel Cascade Lake 8S & Ice Lake 2S MT Benchmarks

Sapphire Rapids-SP (2S)

Xeon 8380 (2S)

Xeon 8280L (8S)

0

15000

30000

45000

60000

75000

90000

0

15000

30000

45000

60000

75000

90000

CPU-z V17 29.1k

38.3k

82.4k

CPU-z V19 15.1k

11.5k

0

CBR15 8.8k

8.3k

9.6k

CBR20 27.6k

26.4k

26.3k

CBR23 68.2k

66.6k

70.9k

Vray 66.9k

71.3k

51.2k

Although this is an ES chip and we expect performance to improve significantly for the Sapphire Rapids-SP chip in the QS state, the final chip may still be only competitive against AMD's EPYC Milan parts while it will be launching at the same time when AMD will come out guns blazing with its next-generation EPYC Genoa 7004 CPUs. With such high power draw and not enough performance at hand, it looks like Intel will be getting a serious beating in the server segment by AMD, something that has been the case over the past few generations.

Intel Xeon CPU Families (Preliminary):