The total multi-thread performance of this 288-core one is probably lower than that of 128-core Epyc.
Sierra Forest is going to be much better than some of you believe. In fact, the 144 core version should be competitive with 128 core Bergamo in performance/watt, partly because Bergamo only has top Turbo of 3.1GHz.
Whether it's lower performance and quite a bit lower power or similar power levels and similar performance, that's yet to be determined.
Intel themselves claim 2.4x performance/watt over Sapphire Rapids. Since it has 2.4x the amount of cores as the 60 core SPR, and SPR has the advantage of having hyperthreading that's responsible for 20-30% gain, that's pretty impressive, especially considering the Golden Cove core in SPR is 40-50% faster than Sierra Glen(server grace Gracemont) E cores in SRF.
Because of that 2.4x the cores if the two CPUs have the same clocks would result in only maybe 30% gain, yet SRF has 2.4x perf/watt. This means few possibilities:
-SRF: 205W, 144 cores that perform 30-40% higher than SPR: 350W, 60 cores
-Sierra Forest is at 270W, but clocks 40% higher than SPR, and is nearly 90% faster than SPR, essentially, the clock increase makes up for architectural differences. 4.2GHz all core versus 2.9GHz all core.
According to SpecCPU tests, the 40-50% advantage Golden Cove and Zen 4 has over Gracemont is split as 20-25% in Integer and 60-65% in floating point. Golden Cove is few low single digit % faster than Zen 4, by the way.
Since Bergamo and Sierra Forest is aimed at cloud workloads, and even most non-HPC server is all integer works, that means Gracemont may be far more competent than on PCs. Then Sierra Forest would only need 3.6GHz to perform 90% faster than Sapphire Rapids, but use only 270W. There's even a possibility they could clock SRF all the way to 4.5GHz so a 2.4x perf/watt also ends up being 2.4x the performance, but at 350W TDP.
So now the real deal. Let's assume 350W Sierra Forest at 4.5GHz. Since Bergamo is also 350W but peaks at 3.1GHz, the reality is the all-core Turbo is probably about 3GHz. This means at the end of the day, it's a core count battle, and SRF has a slight edge at 144 cores versus 128.
But the "real competitor is Turin Dense" you say. You are right, maybe. According to earlier leaked roadmaps, Bergamo was supposed to be very early Q1 of this year, like Dec-Jan. Instead, it came out June of this year. The same roadmap has Turin Dense firmly at Q2 of next year. Best case scenario is that Turin Dense comes a month after SRF, the worst case scenario is that it comes 5-6 months later, meaning some sort of a leapfrog. Hence the existence of 288-core SRF. Looks like Intel wants to be at minimum, competitive in the worst case.
Let's analyze 288-core SRF vs 192 core Turin Dense.
Turin Dense:
-192 cores(1.5x)
-Zen 5(Let's say 1.2x)
-500W
-80% faster than Bergamo
288-core SRF: I speculate roughly 40W of the 350W is taken up by the IO tiles, leaving 310W for Compute. Assuming 144-core SRF is at 4.5GHz, with minimal voltage reductions, we can get a 3.6GHz SRF at 500W. Or 3.4GHz without touching the voltage.
-3.6GHz: 60% faster than Sierra Forest
-3.4GHz: 50% faster than Sierra Forest
Since the assumption is 144-core SRF is a wee bit faster than Bergamo, it looks like 288-core will be competitive. You can see 5% here, and 5% there will swing the favor to either party. But it's nothing like the bloodbath between Genoa and Sapphire Rapids.
www.intel.com
