These are two new slides presented by Twitter that raised a lot of controversy, as what Intel taught added to the controversy. And it is that the chosen tests are just a point on a sheet of paper or a drop in the sea and it will help us to have a brief idea of what is to come in no more than two quarters.
Intel would destroy AMD and its EPYC Milan-X
Watch Intel Sapphire Rapids with high-bandwidth memory outperform the competition by up to 2.8x in computational fluid dynamics workloads.
Learn more: https://t.co/0ZMcUAnqp7 pic.twitter.com/qk488zidSO
— Intel News (@intelnews) February 17, 2022
It was in the OpenFOAM benchmark that Intel showed the muscle of its Sapphire Rapids SP architecture, also in two different variants such as the version with HBM and the version of its processors without this type of memory in its encapsulation.
What is shown is on the one hand expected, but on the other surprising and forward-looking quite intriguing. Sapphire Rapids will be nothing less than a 60% faster than the current Intel Xeon and an impressive 180% faster than that, but where curiously Intel also encrypts AMD.
In this fluid dynamics benchmark, the current generation Ice Lake-based Xeon would be encrypted at 1.0x, which would be equal according to Intel itself in Milan despite significantly fewer cores, implying that the giant’s valuation blue to affirm this data does not circulate.
Much faster than Milan-X, Sapphire Rapids and their benchmarks point to Genoa
While there isn’t a test metric as such, what can be said is that not having to squeeze out as much system RAM as one would expect with a new architecture gives a very promising result in this benchmark. So much so that the new EPYC Milan-X CPUs would be far behind the new Intel to come.
What is happening here? Well, basically there is no specific performance metric and this data should be taken with a grain of salt for now, since a 150%
That doesn’t mean Intel isn’t right in what’s displayed. This benchmark is its own environment to show muscle through the characteristics of its hardware, but in a way and knowing that, it’s a warning of what’s to come. And it is that Sapphire Rapids is not excluded (at least in some environments) against Genoa and Zen 4 as a next generation architecture for servers.
Rumors indicate that AMD will again crush Intel with its new EPYCs which should arrive in the middle of the year (again a rumor), but this data makes us optimistic on what Intel will present in only two months. Can Sapphire Rapids surprise on servers like Alder Lake did on PC?
Ponte Vecchio, much faster than Ampère
The same argument can be made for Ponte Vecchio GPUs given what Intel has shown with Sapphire Rapids on CPUs. And it is that in Financial Services Workload, the company very subtly and painting the competition green has revealed the performance of its graphics chips.
What we see is that the NVIDIA A100, which gives the company such good results, would be vastly surpassed by Intel. At least the blue giant quantifies an improvement of the 70% PVC Monte Carlo and up to a 160% more performance in binomial 16M.
It’s true that financial server loads are very significant to the world at large for what they represent, but that’s just a slight peak on a mountain. Likewise, a performance even similar to what Intel showed and less against the NVIDIA A100 was not expected, so being merely a one-off figure, it must be admitted that it surprised.
It seems that Raja Koduri’s team has some surprises up its sleeve and is coming to compete in the HPC market with NVIDIA and AMD.