Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake SP) Review: Generationally Big, Competitively Small
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 6, 2021 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Servers
- CPUs
- Intel
- Xeon
- Enterprise
- Xeon Scalable
- Ice Lake-SP
SPEC - Single-Threaded Performance
Single-thread performance of server CPUs usually isn’t the most important metric for most scale-out workloads, but there are use-cases such as EDA tools which are pretty much single-thread performance bound.
Power envelopes here usually don’t matter, and what is actually the performance factor that comes at play here is simply the boost clocks of the CPUs as well as the IPC improvement, and memory latency of the cores.
The one hiccup for the Xeon 8380 this generation is the fact that although there’s plenty of IPC gains to be had compared to previous microarchitectures, the new SKU is only boosting up to 3.4GHz, whereas the 8280 was able to boost up to 4GHz, which is a 15% deficit.
Even with the clock frequency disadvantage, thanks to the IPC gains, much improved memory bandwidth, as well as the much larger L3 cache, the new Ice Lake part to most of the time beat the Cascade Lake part, with only a couple of compute-bound core workloads where it falls behind.
The floating-point figures are more favourable to the ICX architecture due to the stronger memory performance.
Overall, the new Xeon 8380 at least manages to post slight single-threaded performance increases this generation, with larger gains in memory-bound workloads. The 8380 is essentially on par with AMD’s 7763, and loses out to the higher frequency optimised parts.
Intel has a few SKUs which offers slightly higher ST boost clocks of up to 3.7GHz – 300Mhz / 8.8% higher than the 8380, however that part is only 8-core and features only 18MB of cache. Other SKUS offer 3.5-3.6GHz boosts, but again less cache. So while the ST figures here could improve a bit on those parts, it’s unlikely to be significant.
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fanboi99 - Friday, April 9, 2021 - link
That statement is totally inaccurate. Both current gen Intel and AMD server lines are readily available.Qasar - Friday, April 9, 2021 - link
Azix, and the other part of that, could be contracts, and the prices they charge for them.lmcd - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
Bunch of desktop enthusiasts failing to understand that as long as Intel provides a new part to augment an existing VM pool that isn't so awful as to justify replacing all existing systems, they're going to retain 90% of their existing customers.adelio - Wednesday, April 7, 2021 - link
but for almost every new intel line they have no choice but to replace everything anyway so AMD are not really at that much of a disadvantage, if any!Oxford Guy - Wednesday, April 7, 2021 - link
'as long as Intel provides a new part to augment an existing VM pool that isn't so awful as to justify replacing all existing systems'That's nifty. I thought Intel likes to require new motherboards and things.
I had no idea these chips are so backwards compatible with older hardware.
domih - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
# Where BS == 'Marketing'AMD = 'Maximum {}, Minimum {}'.format('performance', 'BS')
INTEL = 'Maximum {}, Minimum {}'.format( 'BS', 'performance')
Foeketijn - Wednesday, April 7, 2021 - link
It's good to know powerusage is about the same as the specifications.It shows the madness of an 8 core i9 using more than an 54 core Xeon.
And even those 54 cores are not delivering a decent power/Watt.
If AMD would have made that I/O die on 7nm the this ice lake CPU would even be in deeper trouble.
yankeeDDL - Wednesday, April 7, 2021 - link
Wow. The conclusion is quite shocking. Massive improvement - still not good enough. Wow.Imagine how massively behind is the current generation compared to AMD in the server's market.
Wow.
rf-design - Wednesday, April 7, 2021 - link
The biggest sign would be if a 3nm fab in US starting hiring engaged but undervalued engineers from a 10nm fab which now found good reasons not to move to asia.mode_13h - Wednesday, April 7, 2021 - link
Andrei, thanks for the review, but please consider augmenting your memory benchmarks with something besides STREAM Triad.Particularly in light of the way that Altra benefits from their "non-temporal" optimization, it gives a false impression of the memory performance of these CPUs in typical, real-world use cases. I would suggest a benchmark that performs a mix of reads and writes of various sizes.
Another interesting benchmark to look at would be some sort of stress test involving atomic memory operations.