[Hardware]Dual Intel Xeon Ice Lake-SP CPUs Seemingly Tested: 10nm Chips Take on AMD EPYC 7742

[#REDSTAR ♪ ♫]

2-on-1 handicap match

 

 

A lot of excitement surrounds Intel's looming Xeon Ice Lake-SP chips, as they will be the first non-mobile CPUs to represent the chipmaker's 10nm process node. As spotted today by @TUM_APISAK,  a fresh pair of 28-core chips have landed on the Geekbench 4 benchmark and could offer a glimpse of what to expect from Ice Lake-SP. 

 

Ice Lake-SP is destined to replace Intel's current Cascade Lake offerings. Besides exploiting the 10nm+ manufacturing process, these Ice Lake server chips are expected to usher in the Sunny Cove microarchitecture, as well as support for up to 64 speedy PCIe 4.0 lanes. The core-heavy processors will likely descend upon the Whitley platform, which commands the new LGA4189 socket.

 

An unconfirmed slide from last year suggests that Ice Lake-SP will land with octa-channel memory support and natively embrace DDR4-3200 RAM modules. 

 

The processors were also said to be compatible with Intel's second-generation Optane DC Persistent Memory (Barlow Pass). The slide implies that Ice Lake-SP will stop at 38 CPU cores, meaning the alleged 28-core that we're seeing today might not be the flagship chip.

 

Intel Ice Lake-SP Specifications

 

 

The Intel system from the Geekbench 4 submissions is equipped with two 28-core Ice Lake-SP processors, totaling up to 56 cores and 112 threads. Each chip reportedly features a 1.5 GHz base clock, a maximum clock speed of 3.19 GHz and 42MB of L3 cache. The base clock speed appears to be a lot lower than the base clock on a previously leaked 24-core Ice Lake-SP. However, it's normal to see models with higher core counts come with lower clock speeds. In any event, the Ice Lake-SP samples in the submission could be engineering samples, and Intel hasn't confirmed them, so take the values with a grain of salt.

 

The EPYC 7442 (codename Rome) is one of AMD's multiple 64-core monsters. The chip is the second fastest SKU, only lagging behind the EPYC 7H12. The EPYC 7442 checks in with 64 cores and 128 threads with a base clock of 2.25 GHz base clock and 3.4 GHz boost clock. There is also a whopping 256MB of L3 cache on the processor too.