Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ "Emerald Rapids" Linux Benchmarks

Following the 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" overview, you are likely wondering about the performance claims made by Intel and how they shake up in independent testing as well as how Emerald Rapids competes against AMD EPYC Genoa(X) and Bergamo. If so this article is for you with the Phoronix benchmarks of the new flagship Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ 64-core processors being tested in both single and dual socket modes.

Up on the testing block for the Emerald Rapids launch day is the flagship Xeon Platinum 8592+ processor with 64 cores / 128 threads per socket, a 1.9GHz base clock speed, 2.9GHz all-core turbo frequency, 3.9GHz max turbo frequency, 320MB LLC cache, 350 Watt TDP, DDR5-5600 memory support, and a recommended customer price of $11,600 USD.

In comparison the prior generation Sapphire Rapids with the flagship Xeon Platinum 8490H topped out at 60 cores / 120 threads, 1.9GHz base frequency, 3.5GHz max turbo frequency, 112.5MB LLC cache, 350 Watt TDP, and DDR5-4800 memory support. With Emerald Rapids as a drop-in replacement to Sapphire Rapids (with updated motherboard BIOS) means up to four more cores (eight threads) and slightly higher turbo frequencies while also enjoying significantly higher DDR5 memory bandwidth and also a much larger cache.

With my testing of the Xeon Platinum 8592+ over the past two weeks so far, it exceeded my initial expectations for what I was expecting to see from this "refresh" generation. The power consumption for the most part ended up being fairly similar to the Xeon Platinum 8490H Sapphire Rapids parts but there was meaningful performance uplift in a number of areas.

Over the past two weeks I ran many benchmarks looking at how the Xeon Platinum 8592+ (Emerald Rapids) has evolved not only from the Xeon Platinum 8490H (Sapphire Rapids) but also the Xeon Platinum 8380 (Ice Lake) and Xeon Platinum 8280 (Cascade Lake) processors for those upgrading their servers on longer cycles. Additionally, for comparing how Emerald Rapids stacks up against AMD EPYC Genoa(X), Siena, and Bergamo server processors.

All of these CPUs benchmarked were recently re-tested using Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.6 kernel for providing a very fresh look at the Intel / AMD Linux server performance and being forward-looking for close to the state that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will ship in the spring for that all-important Long-Term Support release. The CPU configurations tested in time for this launch day comparison included:

For providing some further context around the results, the AMD EPYC "- Power" runs are when switching from the default performance determinism mode to the power determinism mode. Plus testing in both single and dual socket (2P) modes where available. With each processor the server was paired with memory at the maximum supported number of channels and memory frequency for each given platform.

I'm also already working on follow-up Emerald Rapids articles looking at the DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-5600 performance, AVX-512 on/off, power optimized mode, etc.