Intel’s Sapphire Rapids-SP, The Xeon Platinum 8480+ CPU, Benchmarks Shows 35% Better Performance Than Ice Lake Flagship
These certainly aren’t the first leaked benchmarks of Intel’s Sapphire Rapids-SP Server CPUs but in Geekbench 5, this is the first time we have seen the Xeon Platinum 8480+ appear. The same chip is going to be one of the highest-end offerings within Intel’s 4th Gen Datacenter lineup and will be offering some high-end specifications which should’ve been a great combatant against AMD’s EPYC Milan if it was not for the several delays. The CPU lineup is now going to compete against a more furious rival in the form of AMD’s EPYC Genoa which rocks far more cores and threads. With that said, Intel’s Sapphire Rapids-SP CPUs may still hold some key positions in the single-threaded HPC and multi-threaded (Multi-Socket 2S+ platforms). As far as the specifications for Intel’s top chip are concerned, the Xeon Platinum 8480+ rocks 56 cores and 112 threads that will utilize the Golden Cove architecture. The Ice Lake flagship, the Xeon Platinum 8380, featured 40 cores and 80 threads based on the Sunny Cove architecture. The EPYC Milan CPUs already rock a higher core count of 64 cores and 128 threads while Genoa will be boosting those up to 96 cores and 192 threads. The CPU features 105 MB of L3 cache and 112 MB of L2 cache for a combined cache of 217 MB. For comparison, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 Ice Lake-SP chip had 110 MB of combined cache (50 MB L2 + 60 MB L3). That’s almost a 2x increase in the amount of cache. However, AMD’s 3rd Gen EPYC Milan chips still rock a higher cache of 288 MB while the Milan-X chip rocks up to 800 MB of cache (512 MB 3D V-Cache + 288 MB L2+L3). The upcoming Genoa chips are expected to rock up to 480 MB of cache in non-3D V-Cache and up to 1248 MB in 3D V-Cache flavors. As for the clock speeds, the Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon Platinum 8480+ CPU rocked a 2.0 GHz base clock and the average clock frequencies were also around the same ballpark. The Intel Ice Lake-SP Xeon Platinum 8380 has a 2.3 GHz base and 3.4 GHz boost clock. The final retail Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon Platinum 8480+ CPU is said to rock a 3.0 GHz boost clock with a TDP of 350W. So coming to the benchmarks, in single-threaded tests, the Ice Lake-SP chip was only 3% ahead of the Sapphire Rapids-SP CPU despite having a 15% clock speed advantage. In multi-threaded tests, the Xeon Platinum 8480+ delivered a 35% performance boost while having a 40% advantage in the number of cores and threads. Once again, these cores were running at a lower clock rate so we can expect the final variants to score a 40-50% improvement over their Ice Lake-SP predecessors. We’d love to add some EPYC benchmarks to the mix but the issue here is that the Xeon Platinum CPUs were tested on the Windows Server 2022 Datacenter OS whereas the majority of the EPYC scores are running Linux so it won’t be a fair comparison. Rest assured, while Intel’s Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon Platinum 8480+ may end up close or even beat the EPYC Milan chips, it may not stand a chance against the Genoa EPYC 9000 CPUs. More on those here.
AMD EPYC Genoa vs Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids-SP Server CPU Platforms
News Source: Benchleaks
