Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC Power Efficiency / Performance-Per-Watt Benchmarks
Across the span of all the benchmarks carried out, the Xeon 6980P in the dual socket configuration was consuming 609 Watts on average for the two processors with a peak of 1085 Watts but 97% of the time was at 1000 Watts or less. This higher power use with the Xeon 6980P is to be expected given the 500 Watt default TDP rating on these flagship Granite Rapids processors. At least with these measurements we are seeing the default TDP be respected on these Xeon 6 processors.
On average the Xeon 6980P 2P was consuming around 15% more power than the AMD EPYC 9684X Genoa-X 2P processor. Bergamo/Genoa(X) is of course 4th Gen AMD EPYC while coming up soon is the launch of 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" processors that will be very interesting to see how those AMD Zen 5 server processors compete for performance and power efficiency.
With the geo mean of the 140+ benchmarks carried out, the Xeon 6980P 2P was around 12% faster than the EPYC 9684X 2P, putting the performance-per-Watt roughly comparable.
Generationally it's looking roughly comparable for Granite Rapids from Emerald Rapids in seeing around 33% better performance overall while the CPU power consumption is up by a similar amount. Granted, for AI and HPC / technical computing workloads is where the Xeon 6980P 2P was often enjoying much loftier advantages compared to prior generation Xeon Scalable processors.
So that's the initial look at the Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids CPU power consumption and power efficiency with the Xeon 6980P processors. Next up on my agenda is diving into the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 memory performance. For more background information on Xeon 6 Granite Rapids, see the launch day review from earlier this week.
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