36-core model lit up in the test
Intel formally introduced Ice Lake-SP server processors in November, but they will not be on sale until next year.
Intel has a trump card up its sleeve? Ice Lake-SP server CPUs can contain more than 32 cores
This is quite an important product for Intel since these are the first 10nm Xeon CPUs. In the original press release, the company talked about a maximum of 32 cores and even compared two of these processors with two 64-core AMD Epyc monsters, claiming that the former is better in several tasks.
However, Ice Lake-SP may still have more cores. This is hinted at by the Geekbench base, where there is the result of a 36-core CPU. The processor operates at a base frequency of 3.6 GHz, and the maximum is not correctly determined. You can also see that there is 45 MB of L2 cache and 54 MB of L3 cache.
More precisely, we tested a system with two such CPUs, and it scored 946 and 35,812 points in single-threaded and multi-threaded modes, respectively—a system of two 32-core Epyc 7542 CPUs scores 1,077 and 42,972 points, respectively. However, the Geekbench results are sometimes quite far from real task performance, so it’s too early to conclude.
