Intel Xeon Platinum 8468 “Sapphire Rapids” CPUs With 96 Cores On Par With AMD’s EPYC 7763 Milan 128-Core CPUs In Leaked Benchmark
The latest benchmark comes from Geekbench 5 (via Benchleaks) where we can see an entry of the Intel Xeon Platinum 8468 CPU. This is an upcoming Sapphire Rapids chip that will be offering 48 cores and 96 threads based on the Golden Cove architecture. The 8468 will come in two configs, a standard 300W with a 2.1 GHz base and 3.0 GHz (3.8 GHz max) boost clocks & a 330W variant with a slightly higher 3.1 GHz all-core boost. This specific benchmark is of the 330W SKU and in a dual-socket configuration. The dual socket configurations allow for up to 96 cores and 192 threads. Each CPU comes with 105 MB of L3 cache and 96 MB of L2 cache for a total of 201 MB cache per chip. The 300W variant only features 90 MB of L3 cache per CPU. Both Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon Platinum 8468 CPUs can be seen running on a Nettrix 60EB32 motherboard platform based on the Linux ecosystem with 512 GB of DDR5 memory. The Intel Xeon Platinum 8468 Sapphire Rapids CPU scores 1253 points in single-core and 74,853 points in the multi-threaded tests. This is right on par with a dual configuration of the AMD EPYC 7763 CPUs which feature 33% higher core and thread counts and also run at higher frequencies. The AMD EPYC Genoa CPU benchmarks leaked a while ago are also used for comparison & those showcase a 17% higher single and 29% higher multi-threaded performance increase while having twice as many cores and threads. The single-core score shows that there is still room for platform optimization on the Sapphire Rapids side. It looks like AMD will still hold the upper hand in the number of cores & threads offered per CPU with their Genoa chips pushing for up to 96 cores and Bergamo going up to 128 cores whereas Intel Xeon chips would max out at 60 cores if they don’t plan on making SKUs with a higher number of tiles. Intel will have a wider and more expandable platform that can support up to 8 CPUs at once so unless Genoa offers more than 2P (dual-socket) configurations, Intel will have the lead in the most number of cores per rack with an 8S rack packing up to 480 cores and 960 threads. The Xeon Sapphire Rapids-SP family is expected to begin volume ramp in early 2023 while AMD will be shipping its Genoa EPYC 9000 line in Q4 2022.
