The launch of the 4th Gen Epyc Genoa family, coupled with the delayed release of Intel’s 4th Gen Xeon Sapphire Rapids lineup, has put the latter in a precarious position. Team Red has the lead in lightly as well as heavily threaded workloads. The Zen 4 cores on Genoa clock much higher than the Golden Cove cores powering Sapphire Rapids. This nullifies the latter’s IPC advantage, stacking well with the higher compute density of the former. (elcapitalino.mx) Even though Sapphire leverages a tiled/chiplet design, AMD’s latest Epyc chips offer over 50% more cores at much lower price points ($11,805 vs. $17,000 for the flagships).
Tests conducted by Phoronix show that the Genoa flagship is an impressive 20% faster than its Intel rival, even with AVX-512 enabled. In the past, this has been one area where Team Blue has always triumphed. The Epyc 9654 (96 cores, 3.7GHz SC boost) registers an average score of 56.34, while the Xeon 8490H (60 cores, 3.5GHz SC boost) manages only 47.19 points.
With AVX-512, power and clock scaling has always been pressing matters. Genoa and Sapphire Rapids handle this problem well, facing little to no drop in the operating frequency and roughly the same power consumption. This is a notable improvement from Ice Lake, where both power and frequency took a hit upon enabling AVX-512.
For AMD’s 4th Gen Genoa family, this is fabulous news. The chipmaker has its rival cornered on almost every front. Team Red may be slacking off on the consumer side, but every possible angle is covered in the data center business.
