A 56-core Sapphire Rapids CPU outperforms a 64-core EPYC

The launch of Intel "Sapphire Rapids" processors is getting closer and closer and it is therefore normal that new details and benchmarks circulate on the network made on samples sent by the same Santa Clara company to manufacturers and partners. Recall that the CPUs will be based on the Golden Cove architecture, built on the Intel 7 process (formerly known as Enhanced SuperFin 10nm), and will support Intel Advanced Matrix eXtensions (AMX) to improve performance in training and inference workloads. The chips will be equipped with up to 64GB of HBM2e memory, eight channels of DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and will integrate support for Optane and CXL 1.1 memory.

Someone recently published their results with an Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+ on Geekbench 5. The chip in question is equipped with 56 cores (with Hyper Threading), 112MB of L2 cache and 105MB of L3 cache, while the reported base frequency is only 2.0GHz. Remembering that these are hardware and firmware in pre-production, the results obtained are equally quite interesting.



Photo Credit: Geekbench 5
Undoubtedly, it will be necessary to wait for the release of the final version to perform more accurate benchmarks, but the Xeon Platinum 8480+ looks pretty cool right now. We recall that the Intel Sapphire Rapids processors should debut during the third quarter of this year, colliding with the AMD EPYC 7004 (Genoa) line, which will be able to count on the computational power of the Zen 4 cores and a construction on the process node at 5nm from TSMC.