Over the past five years, AMD’s workstation-class Threadripper family has surpassed Intel’s Xeon processors, either in terms of price / performance, maximum performance, or both. Although Ryzen has offered increasingly stiff competition for Intel over time, AMD’s workstation edge has become larger and more consistently sustainable than its consumer position. Intel’s Alder Lake now offers much stronger competition than AMD and Intel is keen to replicate that edge in the server market with its upcoming platform, Sapphire Rapids. Now, leaked benchmarks suggest that Intel’s 56-core Sapphire Rapids will be able to challenge the 64-core Raisin Threadripper 3990X.
It’s not terribly surprising. Threadripper 3990X is based on AMD’s Zen 2 architecture, which means it lacks a ~ 15 percent throughput improvement based on the Zen 3. These are the loop results provided by @yuuki_ans, so as always, take them with a grain of salt and apply them fairly. The Xeon 8470 Platinum in question seems to have a 3.8GHz peak turbo watch, but this may be due to the chip being an engineering model. Early ES CPUs are often under-clocked or have other performance errors that slow them down compared to final retail CPUs.
Intel Zion Platinum 8470
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CPU-z v2.01 v17:
Single: 515
Multicore: 55000
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CineBench R15 / 20/23:
Single: 144/414/1079
Multicore: 8949/29344/79150
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V-ray (4.10.03): 76710 pic.twitter.com/5R69LlC3NX– Yasushi Yuki-Yuki_ans 🇨🇳 (@yuuki_ans) April 27, 2022
Compared to the 3Dripper, our own benchmarks show the CPU on the Synebench R20 at 25,790, rising to 33,288 when an all-core overclocked at 4.3GHz. While we don’t expect AMD to send such a Threadripper configuration, the 64-chip remains strikingly overclockable. On the V-Ray, the Xeon Platinum 8470 hits 74,449, compared to 74,254 for a stock-locked Threadripper 3990X.
AMD’s performance on the CB20 was breathtaking – and yet, to be honest, if you look at the overclocked numbers. I hit this overclock courtesy of a polar vortex that dropped the outside temperature to ~ 10F.
It’s interesting to note that the Sapphire Rapids won the Threadripper 3990X with only 56 cores compared to AMD’s 64 – a 15 percent core-count deficit is nothing short of a sneeze, and AMD’s extra cores help Intel win the enterprise and workstation market in the long run. Has done. . These results could explain why AMD will pack 96 cores on its upcoming Zen 4 platform. The increase in core numbers gives small companies a strong chance to stay ahead of the competition, especially when combined with single-thread improvements will bring Zen 4 to the table.
Another thing to keep in mind about a chip like the Sapphire Rapids is that it has much more memory bandwidth than the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X. AMD’s top-end workstation CPU is limited to four DDR4 channels, while Sapphire Rapids has eight DDR5 channels. We do not expect that this will affect the results of the Synebench – that test is quite centralized and minimally affected by the memory subsystem – but the performance of other benchmarks may be severely affected.
Intel is aggressively advancing its own performance and product role and we expect this to continue until 2022 – 2023. AMD has done well so far in dealing with the resurgent Intel, but the Zen 4 will have to fire on the market on all thrusters when it comes later this year.
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