June 13, 2023 – The day before AMD’s highly anticipated press conference, Intel took the opportunity to share a press release comparing its latest Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPU with AMD’s EPYC Genoa. In this press release, Intel highlighted their own performance metrics, presenting a contrasting view of the two processors in terms of AI benchmarking, workloads, and total cost of ownership (TCO).
When it comes to AI benchmarks, Intel claims that their flagship Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPU, the 8462Y, outperforms AMD’s EPYC 9354 Genoa by a staggering 7.11 times. Intel further emphasizes that the Sapphire Rapids not only exhibits superior overall performance but also leads the way in terms of performance per watt.
Moving on to workloads, Intel asserts that their Xeon processors outshine AMD’s EPYC processors with a performance advantage of 2.52 times across various scenarios, including SPECint, MySQL Casandra, Microsoft SQL, GROMACS, LAMMPS, NAMD, and Monte Carlo. Furthermore, Intel’s processors also demonstrate superior performance per watt, with a ratio of 2.51 times compared to AMD’s offering.
In terms of total cost of ownership (TCO), Intel provides some cost-saving figures. They claim that by utilizing their Sapphire Rapids-based Intel Xeon CPUs, businesses can achieve savings of up to 8% in the PostgreSQL database environment, 35% in the Microsoft SQL 2022+ QAT Backup database, 38% in HPC workloads such as BlackScholes, 61% in AI applications like DLRM, and a whopping 79% in AI Natural Language Processing tasks such as BertLarge.
In addition to the Sapphire Rapids series, Intel also introduced their flagship product, the Xeon Max 9480 CPU, featuring up to 56 cores and integrated HBM memory on the package. This CPU was pitted against AMD’s fastest EPYC 9654 with 96 cores. In pure HPC workload comparisons, the Xeon Max chip showcased double the performance of Genoa.
As the competition between Intel and AMD continues to intensify, these performance and cost-saving differentiators showcased by Intel are likely to spark further excitement among technology enthusiasts and businesses alike. With both companies striving to push the boundaries of innovation, customers can look forward to a competitive market that drives progress and delivers cutting-edge solutions for diverse computing needs.
