Intel Xeon 6780E Sierra Forest vs. AMD EPYC 9965 On Linux 6.18 Performance
For those that have been wanting fresh AMD EPYC Turin vs. Intel Xeon 6 Sierra Forest benchmarks, there you have it.
While Intel Sierra Forest performance is much faster now than at launch time, Granite Rapids and EPYC Turin have also evolved nicely too with the latest upstream Linux kernel and other open-source software updates like around the GCC compiler. So ultimately no change in the overall positioning.
AMD EPYC 9965 continues to lead the multi-threaded race with dominating performance thanks to its 192 cores / 384 threads complete with AVX-512 and all of the other Zen 5 ISA capabilities. While the Xeon 6780E 2P has improved nicely on the software side since launch, so have the other processors while this 144-core processor remains constricted by lack of HT/SMT, no AVX-512 (or AMX), and eight channel DDR5 memory. It will be interesting to see though how Intel Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest can ultimately compete in this space. This though is just the fresh look at the current Xeon 6 and AMD EPYC 9005 processors for early 2026 atop the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel and Ubuntu 25.10 ahead of the all important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April.
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