AMD Zen 3 EPYC 7003 And Intel Ice Lake-SP Xeon Face Off In Monster CPU Spec Showdown
It has been interesting to see AMD and duke it out on the home desktop, the former with its latest generation Zen 3 architecture and the latter with Comet Lake (soon to be Rocket Lake). But that is not the only place these two chip giants tussle. The server space is an important battleground, and both are set to load up new artillery, models and specs of which have seemingly leaked out.
Leaked information on upcoming server CPUs has been an ongoing thing, actually, some of which we have covered. Back in December, for example, a pair of next-gen EPYC 7003 series CPUs with 64-cores and 128-threads ripped through Cinebench 23, scoring an insane 87,878 in the multi-core test and 1,215 in the single-core test. That was a 2P system, so it had 128 cores and 256 threads to throw at the benchmark.
A month prior to that, Intel teased its upcoming third-generation Xeon Scalable processors based on Ice Lake, making the claim that a 32-core/64-core variant is faster than a 64-core/128-thread EPYC 7742 processor in certain workloads. The caveat is that Intel was referring to very specific benchmarks that leverage AVX-512 instructions, rather than across the board performance.
In any event, the stage is set for AMD's upcoming EPYC 7003 series (Milan) to battle Intel's upcoming Ice-Lake-SP Xeon CPUs for supremacy in the server market. And as we await, prominent leaker @usmomomo_us posted details about 19 rumored EPYC Milan SKUs and 22 rumored Ice Lake-SP Xeon SKUs. Have a look...
Source: @momomo_us
Looking at the left half, Intel's Ice Lake-SP Xeon processors will span 8 cores and 16 threads, on up to 40 cores and 80 threads, across the usual Platinum, Gold, and Silver families. Do not mistake these for Sapphire Rapids parts, though. Intel will flesh out its Xeon lineup later this year with chips based on its 10-nanometer SuperFin manufacturing, with DDR5 and PCI Express 5.0 support in the fold. These are not those chips.
Intel's Ice Lake-SP processors are based on the company's Sunny Cove architecture. It's rumored the lineup will culminate with the Xeon Platinum 8380 featuring 40 cores and 80 threads clocked at 2.3GHz (base), with a 270W TDP. AMD will offer more cores and threads at the top end, but it seems Intel is confident its support for AVX-512 instructions will lure buyers.
It's a bit of a messy lineup, in terms of how the model numbers scale, and there is no mention of the cache arrangement in the leak. But it gives you an idea of what Intel has in store.
As for AMD, it will also offer its upcoming server CPUs in configurations starting at 8 cores and 16 threads, but will scale up to 64 cores and 128 threads. It's a bit easier to parse AMD's lineup, because higher model numbers denote more cores and/or faster clocks.
The EPYC 7763 sits at the top of the stack. It is a 64-core/128-thread server CPU with a 2.55GHz base clock and 280W TDP. And while not mentioned, past rumors indicate it will sport 256MB of L3 cache.
You will also notice there are four SKUs with a "P" designation. These are one that are intended for single-socket setups, whereas all the rest can be part of a dual-socket (2P) configuration. That includes the flagship model, to bash workloads over the head with 128 cores and 256 threads.
There is no mention of pricing, which will obviously play an important role in which side server customers end up choosing.
