Intel Claims its 56 cores $25K CPU is faster than AMDs 64 Cores $7K CPU
Intel is feeling the heat from AMD and in order to prove its point, has released series of benchmark depicting its Xeon Cascade Lake based CPU is 31% to 84% faster than AMD’s second generation Epyc CPU through its “real world” testing.
As posted on medium.com, Intel’s compared the Xeon Platinum 9200 versus the EPYC 7742. The Xeon has two dies with 56 cores and 112 threads. The chip has a base clock of 2.60 GHz and a boost clock of 3.80 GHz along with 77 MB of cache and a TDP of 400W.
AMDs Ryzen on the other hand features 64 cores / 128 threads. The chip has a base clock of 2.25 GHz and a boost clock of 3.4 GHz with 256 MB of L3 cache, a TDP of 225W. On the Price front,
On the price front, Intel’s offering is at $25K and AMD is standing at $7K.
The Result
Intel demonstrates that its Xeon even with less cores delivers 31% higher performance on an average with highest gap being at 81%. Intel also claims that the processors offer a lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) even though Xeon has higher TDP as higher performance will entail a fewer number of nodes which should drive down the node acquisition cost, lower fabric, switching and cabling cost.
Intel also claims having advance AVX512 instructions set helps in better performance.
Intel’s Contention
Just like adding more people to a meeting does not always lead to greater productivity, “more cores” will not always guarantee “more performance.” Performance is a factor of many things, not just a single vector. More processor cores add compute, but overall system or workload performance depends on other factors, including:
- The performance of each core
- Software optimizations leveraging specific instructions
- Memory bandwidth to ensure feeding of the cores
- Cluster-level scaling deployed
What is Intel forgetting
Netflix has recently tested Intel and AMD solutions and found AMD to outperform Intel. Not to mention that Intel seems to get more vulnerability and patching them generally means lower performance. Not to mention that AMD will be launching Zen 2 based processors with more cores than before at price hard to compete.
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