Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 128-Core Showdown With The Latest Linux Software For EOY2025
A lot of dominating results by the AMD EPYC 9755 compared to the Xeon 6980P flagship at the same 128 core / 256 thread count per socket. Turin and Granite Rapids both launched just over one year ago and was interesting to revisit the performance now with the latest Linux 6.18 LTS stable kernel and Ubuntu 25.10. While Ubuntu 25.10 is a non-LTS release, its package versions are not too far off from where Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will be in April, especially with having done the Linux kernel upgrade for this testing.
With nearly 200 benchmarks in total, on a geo mean basis the AMD EPYC 9755 absolutely dominated the Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids flagship with achieving 1.63x the performance overall. That's rather incredible considering the same core/thread count.
With the latest software packages, the AMD EPYC 9755 performance continues performing exceptionally well under Linux and flying past Granite Rapids for the vast majority of benchmarks. The areas where the Intel Xeon 6980P pulled first place finishes tended to just be the CPU-based AI workloads able to leverage Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) and/or the very memory bandwidth intensive workloads where the MRDIMM-8800 memory was an advantage. But with the MRDIMM modules is also added cost and increased power consumption compared to DDR5-6400 DIMMs.
When looking at the combined dual socket power consumption of these processors across all the tests, the AMD EPYC 9755 was slightly higher overall but made up for with the significantly better performance. It would have been interesting to see how the AC server power consumption difference would play out given the higher memory use out of MRDIMMs, but alas, as mentioned not practical for this comparison due to the one reference server being used. Per the MRDIMM vs. DDR5-6400 GNR benchmarks in September, across a 12 memory module comparison for a 1P server configuration it was around a 100 Watt increase in using MRDIMMs.
That's where the AMD EPYC 9005 vs. Intel Xeon 6900P performance is at for the end of 2025 at the same core count. AMD EPYC is in an excellent position as we close out the year and look forward to AMD EPYC Venice and Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids next year. Stay tuned for more year-end benchmark comparisons and other fresh Linux performance data through the new year.
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