Intel 10nm Ice Lake SP ‘Whitley’ CPU 12C/24T Benchmark Leak Confirms Core-Per-Core Improvement Over 14nm Predecessor

A Geekbench benchmark listing of alleged Intel Whitley Lake CPU confirms the company has successfully transitioned its server-grade CPUs to the new manufacturing process. In other words, the engineering sample is reportedly manufactured on the 10nm Fabrication Node, and allegedly shows substantial performance gains over the 14nm predecessor, the Purley.

A new listing on the Geekbench website points to a new Intel CPU being benchmarked. The performance summary, which obviously belongs to a prototype or engineering sample, strongly indicates that the Intel Whitley platform, which will succeed Purley, has successfully transitioned Intel’s server ecosystem to the 10nm manufacturing process. Although the sample is clearly an early sample and there’s obviously no finetuning, the benchmark listing indicates customers and clients can confidently expect a big jump in performance as compared to older generation Intel Xeon Server-grade processors.

Intel 10nm Ice Lake SP ‘Whitley’ Platform Ready To Take On AMD 7nm ‘Milan’ Processors?

Intel’s Ice Lake CPUs, based on the Sunny Cove Architecture, marks a fundamental evolutionary shift in the company’s CPU architecture usage, especially in the large-scale commercial production. Based on the early reports, the new Intel CPUs were already expected to show substantial gains in performance and power efficiency. Intel has been routinely hinting about the boost in both the key parameters, but the extent is only becoming visible now.

The Intel 10nm Ice Lake derivative that will succeed 14nm Purley has been codenamed Whitley, and the latest leak pertains to an engineering sample of this server-grade CPU. In other words, Intel appears to be testing an Ice Lake SP CPU based on the 10nm process.

The massive RAM array (384GB) and the 64Bit Microsoft Windows Server 2019 OS clearly indicate a server application of the processor. The mystery Intel Ice Lake SP appears to be a 12-Core / 24-Thread CPU. The Core and Thread Count puts the mystery Intel CPU in the lower end of the Ice Lake SP (Whitley) lineup. But Geekbench listings often contain incomprehensible or confusing names and the topology. Still, the identifier makes it clear.

The odd thing about the Geekbench listing is that the CPU has a Turbo of mere 2.7 GHz. Needless to say, this is far less than the clock speeds attained by modern Intel processors. Interestingly, owing to process maturity, the upcoming Intel Ice Lake CPUs could easily sport lower clock speeds and still be a lot better than its predecessors. This phenomenon is amply visible from the performance results.

The 10nm Intel Whitley Ice Lake SP CPU ES sample scored a multi-core score of almost 28,000 points. This is nearly double that of the previous Purley platform not just on a core for core but also a clock for clock basis. The CPU being tested is obviously an unoptimized engineering sample, and hence the single Core test results are not impressive at all. However, the multi-core performance is more than 200 percent more than that of Purley.

With such a powerful server-grade CPU, and that too in its preliminary or prototype stage, Intel clearly has a fighting chance against AMD’s third-generation processors that are based on ‘Milan’. In fact, AMD’s EPYC server-grade CPUs might be based on the 7nm Fabrication node, but they could be outpaced by the 10nm Intel Whitley Ice Lake SP CPU.