Intel 5th Gen Xeon “Emerald Rapids” sets for tough competition

Intel’s upcoming Emerald Rapids HPC processor series is expected to improve the company’s Xeon portfolio with an increase in core count compared to the long-delayed Sapphire Rapids series. However, this improvement is not as big as the EPYC line, which now has up to 96 Zen4 cores (or even 128 with Zen4c). For Intel, the core count is said to be raised to 64 cores by the upcoming 5th Gen Xeon architecture.

In a bid to compete with the EPYC lineup, Intel is focusing on configurations with lower core counts, such as the 48 cores/96 threads configuration. This will be available across various SKUs in the upcoming 5th Gen Xeon series. Recently, two of these new Xeon CPUs, the Xeon Platinum 8551C and Xeon Platinum 8558P , were spotted on Geekbench. Both CPUs, featuring 48 cores and 96 threads, were tested on the CentOS Linux OS, possibly on the same platform equipped with 256GB of DDR5 memory.

Detailed Geekbench data reveals that both CPUs achieved boosts up to 3.17 GHz during the test. However, it is worth noting that Geekbench might struggle to provide consistent, reliable information for high-core count CPUs. What seems to be confirmed, though, is that the 8551C has a base clock of 2.9 GHz, while the 8558P operates at a base clock of 2.7 GHz.

Xeon Emerald Rapids CPUs, Source: Geekbench

The AMD EPYC Genoa processor, featuring a 48-core config and 290W TDP, demonstrates better performance compared to both Intel Xeon Emeralds Rapids CPUs in both single-core and multicore benchmarks. Despite this, it’s worth noting that Intel CPUs managed to outperform the EPYC 7643 CPU with a 240W TDP under similar configurations of 48 cores and 96 threads.

The recently unveiled consumer-grade HEDT CPU, known as Threadripper 7970X, was only introduced last week. We included this 32-core CPU in our comparison to show that data-center processors will struggle to rival the Threadripper CPU in single-threaded workloads. Nevertheless, the HPC processors maintain an advantage in multithreaded tests. The reason we added this CPU is that Intel will launch its Xeon W3500/2500 workstation/HEDT CPUs next year, which will likely be heavily derived from Emerald Rapids.

The Intel 5th Gen Xeon Series will be released on December 14th. It will come along with consumer platforms like Meteor Lake. At this moment, it is unclear if Xeon is said to launch a full lineup, or rather announce several parts that were already confirmed and launch more SKUs later. One is clear though is that Intel is already working on the even more capable Granite Rapids series, expected later next year.

Source: Geekbench (8558P) , Geekbench (8551C) via Wccftech