A pair of Intel Xeon Ice Lake-SP processors were able to overtake 64-core AMD EPYC
Intel by the end of this year should present the first family of 10nm Ice Lake-SP server processors. The results of testing a system with two processors of this family were seen by a well-known network source with the alias Tum_Apisak in the Geekbench 4 benchmark. This allows at least to some extent imagine what can be expected from Intel’s first non-mobile 10nm processors.
The system we tested consisted of two 28-core Ice Lake-SP processors for a total of 56 physical cores and 112 processing threads. The cache size of the third level for each chip was 42 MB. Each processor ran at a base frequency of 1.5 GHz, with a maximum turbo frequency of 3.2 GHz. Such low frequencies indicate that rather early engineering samples passed the testing. In any case, I would like to believe that the final versions of Ice Lake-SP will offer much more impressive frequencies.
The Ice Lake-SP benchmark scored 3424 points for single-core performance, while the system’s multi-core performance scored 38,079. For comparison, one 64-core AMD EPYC 7442 scores 4398 and 35 492 points in these tests, respectively. That is, the difference is 28.4 and 7.3%, respectively. Only in the first case, the difference is in AMD’s favor, and in the other in Intel’s favor. Note that the AMD processor has higher frequencies of 2.25 / 3.4 GHz, and also has 256 MB of L3 cache.
It is worth adding here that Intel Xeon processors of the Ice Lake-SP family will be able to boast of support for AVX-512 instructions, which AMD chips are completely devoid of. However, AMD often has a much lower cost, and in this case, it is unlikely that everything will be different. Finally, AMD chips offer a higher density: where Intel can offer a pair of 28-core chips, AMD is able to provide two 64-core processors.
And of course, do not forget that judging the performance of processors by one test is not very fair, especially when it comes to early tests of engineering samples. However, the results described above only fueled interest in Ice Lake-SP.
