Sapphire Rapids HBM2E CPUs Fall Behind EPYC 3D V-Cache CPUs In Leaked Benchmarks
A well-known blogger has shared perhaps the first performance numbers for Intel’s upcoming Xeon Platinum Sapphire Rapids processor with 60 cores and HBM2E cache.
Some of Intel’s customers are already PRQ version (opens in new tab) Even so, the launch of mass-production models of some 4th Gen Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processors has been delayed until late 2022, requiring the company to fix certain bugs in the silicon and recertify those CPUs with partners. As a result, a full-scale launch is scheduled for 2023. Intel has kept the specifications of its upcoming product a secret. There are already a number of Sapphire Rapids processors out there, so not only do we know some of their claimed specifications, but their performance numbers have also been revealed before launch.
YuuKi_AnS (opens in new tab)is a well-known hardware leaker with an impressive track record and access to unannounced hardware, and has acquired Intel’s 60-core Xeon Platinum 8490H CPU and 52-core Xeon Platinum 8472C processor. It probably has 64 GB of HBM2E cache. The hardware blogger not only published the specs of the product, but also published the benchmark results. All information is evidenced by screenshots (see gallery below), so there is some confidence, but there may be some mistakes. In the meantime, we’re dealing with prototyping hardware, so take the results with a grain of salt.
| core/thread | Cache L2+L3 | frequency | TDP-PBP-MTP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xeon Platinum 8472C* | 52/112 | 112MB + 97.5MB | 2.50GHz to 3.80GHz | 350W – 420W – 764W |
| Xeon Platinum 8490H* | 60/120 | 120MB + 112.5MB | 1.90GHz to 3.50GHz | 350W – 420W – 764W |
*Specifications are unconfirmed.
Last spring, Intel was only planning to release up to 56-core Sapphire Rapids CPUs, but now the company is testing a 60-core Xeon Platinum 8490H processor running between 1.90 GHz and 3.50 GHz. Additionally, the company has tested his 52-core Xeon Platinum 8472C CPU with 64 GB of HBM2E memory on-package and it seems to run at a pretty high 2.50 GHz to 3.80 GHz.
| CPU-Z single thread | CPU-Z multithreading | |
|---|---|---|
| Xeon Platinum 8472C | 542.5 | 31,954.3 |
| Xeon Platinum 8490H | 508 | 32,747.6 |
Due to its higher frequency, Intel’s Xeon Platinum 8472C offers slightly better single-threaded performance than the company’s Xeon Platinum 8490H CPU on the CPU-Z 2.02.0 benchmark. Still, the 60-core model scores slightly higher for multithreaded workloads.
Core count and frequency affect performance for virtually all workloads, but adding HBM2E memory (1.22 TBps peak bandwidth) can help some memory bandwidth-limited applications, such as computational fluid dynamics and rendering. Your workload will benefit.
| threads and frequency | V-Ray score (K samples) | |
|---|---|---|
| 2x Xeon Platinum 8472C | 224 @ 2.50-3.80GHz | 95,014 |
| 2x Xeon Platinum 8490H | 240 @ 1.90-3.50GHz | 71,830 |
| 2x AMD EPYC 7773X | 256 @ 2.20-3.50GHz | 102,843 |
| 2x AMD EPYC 7763 | 256 @ 2.45-3.50GHz | 109,248 |
This is exactly what we see in Chaos’ V-Ray 4.10.03 benchmark, which takes advantage of both more cores and higher performance per core. 64GB of his HBM2E memory plays a more important role here. So the Xeon Platinum 8472C is about 32% faster compared to its sibling his Xeon Platinum 8490H.
Interestingly, AMD’s EPYC 7773X (Milan-X with 3D V-Cache) can’t beat the slightly faster EPYC 7763 processor. Nonetheless, both already available CPUs are currently out of hand with Intel’s not-yet-market offerings.
One thing YuuKi_AnS pointed out is that newer BIOS versions tend to add more performance to Intel’s Sapphire Rapids CPUs. Therefore, production servers and workstations based on these CPUs will provide better performance than current samples, assuming that the microcode for these processors is further optimized. But until those machines arrive, we’re just analyzing the results we got on the pre-production CPUs.
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