Intel Xeon Gold 5220R + Xeon Gold 6226R Linux Performance

Now moving on to the performance-per-dollar metrics based on the current US retail pricing at in-stock retailers as of writing this article.

As expected, the Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh parts -- at least the 6226R and 5220R -- are delivering better performance-per-dollar than previous Xeon CPUs and more competitive performance per dollar against EPYC than previously seen. Currently though the Xeon Gold 5220R and 6226R are retailing at higher price points than originally laid out by Intel, presumably due to the limited supply, so with time this retail pricing based performance-per-dollar should be looking even better for Cascade Lake Refresh.

Out of 74 tests ran across all of the tested CPUs in this comparison, the geometric mean of all those results put the Xeon Gold 5220R and 6226R in a dual socket configuration coming out around 4% and 8% faster than the EPYC 7352 2P, which retail for about $1500 USD each and thus a similar price point to these new Xeon Gold processors. It's great seeing the strides made by Cascade Lake Refresh on pricing / performance-per-dollar. The dual 5220R/6226R CPU configurations even slightly surpass the Xeon Platinum 8280 in a single socket configuration. In a single socket configuration the Xeon Gold 5220R/6226R both well surpassed the EPYC 7302P and the earlier Gold 5218 and Silver 4216 models.

Stay tuned for more Ubuntu 20.04 LTS benchmarks between AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon shortly on Phoronix. Those wanting to see how their own Linux system(s) compare to these server CPUs in this article and have a lot of time on their hands can install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 2004100-NI-XEONEPYC951 for your own fully-automated, side-by-side benchmark comparison.