[Hardware] Intel 3rd Gen Ice Lake-SP Xeon Platinum 8351N CPU Benchmarked, Up To 65% Faster Than 32 Core AMD EPYC Rome Chips With AVX-512

[_Happy boy]

New benchmarks of Intel's 3rd Gen Xeon Platinum 8351N CPU have leaked out which show a huge performance gain over AMD EPYC Rome CPUs when utilizing its AVX-512 instruction set. The Intel Ice Lake-SP Xeon family is scheduled for a formal launch on the 6th of April at the 'How Wonderful Gets Done 2021' event while a sneak peek is expect tomorrow at the 'Intel Unleashed' webcast by CEO, Pat Gelsinger.

Intel's 3rd Gen Ice Lake-SP Xeon Platinum 8351N CPU Benchmarked, 65% Performance Uplift Over AMD EPYC Rome When Utilizing AVX-512
Last time, we looked at the benchmarks of the Intel Xeon Platinum 8352S/Y CPUs in both single & dual-socket configurations. The latest benchmarks right now are of a single-socket configured Intel Xeon Platinum 8351N CPU which features 36 cores and 72 threads. The CPU has a base clock of 2.4 GHz and a boost clock of 3.5 GHz. The CPU also carries 54 MB of L3 cache, 45 MB of L2 cache, and a TDP of 225W.The Xeon Platinum 8351N has more cores/threads and higher clocks compared to the Xeon 8352 CPUs and as such, it should feature much higher performance. The CPU was tested in the SANDRA SiSoftware 2021 benchmark suite within the processor Arithmetic & Multi-Media tests. Do note that the Multi-Media test, in particular, makes use of AVX-512 instructions which the Ice Lake-SP CPUs have to offer so we will be looking at a bigger gain compared to non-AVX-512 chips. So let's take a look at the performance results.

For comparison, average scores for various other server & workstation processors from the same benchmark database were used. In the processor Arithmetic test, Intel's Ice Lake-SP Xeon Platinum 8351N CPU scored 962.37 GOPS which is an 8% improvement over the 8352S for a 6% clock speed bump and 12% increased core count. Compared to the AMD EPYC 7532 32 core CPU, the Platinum 8351N scores a 19% lead. Moving over to the multi-media test, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8351N ends up 13% faster than the Xeon Platinum 8352S and a massive 65% faster than the AMD EPYC 7542 32 core CPU.

This shows the performance uplift that AVX-512 has to offer but the technology does come at a cost and that's power consumption. With AVX-512, you can expect the chip to end up close to 300 Watts or even exceed that limit which further reduces its efficiency compared to AMD EPYC CPUs. Aside from that, AVX-512 workloads are niche in the server segment, and not all cloud/data center environments make use of the technology. We know that AMD is also planning to use AVX3-512 instructions in its future EPYC Genoa chips but right now, we cannot make a valid comparison of the tech against competing chips.

All we know is that in standard workloads, the Ice Lake-SP CPUs will end up around 10-20% faster than AMD's 2nd Gen EPYC Rome CPUs but AMD has launched its 3rd Gen EPYC Milan CPUs with Zen 3 cores which offer a big improvement over Rome so it will be a hard time for Intel to make Ice Lake-SP competitive against those parts.