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 - Per-Core Performance under Load
A metric that is actually more interesting than isolated single-thread performance, is actually per-thread performance in a fully loaded system. This actually is a measurement and benchmark figure that would greatly interest enterprises and customers which are running software or workloads that are possibly licensed on a per-core basis, or simply workloads that require a certain level of per-thread service level agreement in terms of performance.
This has been a strong-point of Intel SKUs for some time now, even when the chips wouldn’t be competitive in terms of total throughput. With the new Ice Lake SPs SKUs now more notably increasing total throughput, it’ll be interesting to see the per-thread breakdown and resulting performance:
Because the total throughput generational performance increase is larger than the core count increase of the parts, this means that per-thread and per-core performance is higher with this generation. The Xeon 8380 is posting +16.3% and +10.4% per-thread performance versus the Xeon 8280 when only using one thread per core.
Interestingly, these figures are less at +8.2 and +7.4% when using both SMT threads per core. Intel has explained such an increase through the better usage of shared microarchitectural structure usage in the new Sunny Cove cores, essentially diminishing the SMT yield by improving 1/T per core performance.
Generally, Intel is extremely competitive in this benchmark metric, and while AMD easily beats them with the frequency-optimised parts, it’s an advantage that should help Intel in the SLA-centric workloads.
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rahvin - Sunday, April 18, 2021 - link
The bigger the silicon ingot the more expensive it is to produce. Though the problems with EUV may have delayed development my guess would be the additional cost of the larger ingots negates the cost savings on the other side, particularly with the EUV tools being 10X more expensive.Lukasz Nowak - Thursday, April 8, 2021 - link
There's another curious thing about the wafer. There are a lot of dies with just clipped corners. If they shifted the entire pattern to the left or right by a quarter of a die, they would get 6 more good ones. That's 7% more dies for free (90 instead of 84).Wouldn't that be worth doing?
Smell This - Thursday, April 8, 2021 - link
Maybe Chipzillah can glue them together . . . HA!
Speaking of which __ it this aN *MCM* multi-chip module ?
Chaitanya - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
Even that upgrade is falling short of catching up.Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
Exactly. What's with these nonsense comments, anyway? It is like bragging about how I can now run a 10-minute mile instead of a 20-minute mile while the star players are breaking world records and running 4-minute miles. *facepalm*Wilco1 - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
No kidding. It is not even matching Graviton 2! A $8k CPU beaten by an Arm CPU from 2019...Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
and yet that's still a lot of falling short for Intel 🤷♂️fallaha56 - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
not really, the 38 and 40 core parts won't be available in any amounts (see Semiaccurate)and as can be seen in the lower spec parts, suddenly Ice Lake is barely beating Cascake Lake never mind AMD
fallaha56 - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
https://semiaccurate.com/2021/04/06/intels-ice-lak...Gondalf - Wednesday, April 7, 2021 - link
LOL semi-accurate. 40-38 cores parts already for sale.