Intel Claims Sapphire Rapids-SP Supercharged HBM Xeon CPUs Over 2x Faster Than AMD EPYC Milan & Milan-X Chips

Feb 17, 2022 at 01:31pm EST
Intel Claims Sapphire Rapids-SP Supercharged HBM Xeon CPUs Over 2x Faster Than AMD EPYC Milan & Milan-X Chips

Intel has revealed new benchmarks of its upcoming data center products including the HBM-Supercharged Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon CPUs.

Intel Claims Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon CPUs Are Over Two Times Faster Than AMD's EPYC Milan-X

In the performance slide shown by Intel, the company compares its upcoming Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon CPUs with HBM to its older Ice Lake Xeon Scalable chips and AMD's EPYC Milan/Milan-X CPUs. The workload used here was the OpenFOAM benchmark, specifically the Computational Fluid Dynamics test. Intel states that this benchmark was running on a pre-production Sapphire Rapids chip so final performance numbers may vary.

Related Story Intel Revives Raptor Lake Again With Core 7 230H And Core 5 205H, But Strips Out The Integrated Graphics Entirely

In the benchmark, the Sapphire Rapids-SP non-HBM solution offers up to 60% higher performance than Ice Lake-SP while the HBM Xeon solution offers up to 180% performance increase. The same is true when comparing the chip to AMD's EPYC Milan lineup. Versus the standard Milan, the new Sapphire Rapids-SP chip should offer up to a 180% performance increase and a 150% increase over the recently launched Milan-X lineup. Unfortunately, this is just one performance metric and Intel hasn't disclosed the test apparatus. It is likely that this workload has an advantage for the Intel chip lineup.

Super Compute Roadmap and Strategy – More than 85 percent of the world’s supercomputers run on Intel Xeon processors. Building on this foundation, AXG is extending to higher compute and memory bandwidth and will deliver a leadership CPU and GPU roadmap to power high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. To date, Intel expects more than 35 HPC-AI design wins from top OEMs and CSPs. Additionally, AXG has set a course that paves the way to zetta-scale by 2027.

Intel also compared the performance of its Ponte Vecchio GPU which should offer up to 160% performance increase versus competing solutions from NVIDIA (Ampere A100). The benchmark used here was the Financial Services workload measurements. Once again, no specific have been provided for this benchmark either.

While Intel Sapphire Rapids-SP Xeon CPU looks quite good in these benchmarks, especially in its pre-production state, we have to remember that the lineup will be competing against AMD's EPYC Genoa by the time it launches and not EPYC Milan-X so team red would still have a major advantage over team blue. The Ponte Vecchio GPU will be competing against NVIDIA's Hopper and AMD's Instinct Mi200 class GPUs.

About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.