Intel Xeon Platinum “Sapphire Rapids” 8468 Tested, Loses Out to its Milan Counterpart

Intel’s HEDT Sapphire-Rapids series is targeted for AMD’s Milan lineup. However, due to various delays, Intel is now put against AMD’s EPYC Genoa series, which crushes everything put infront of it. Today the Xeon Platinum 8468 featuring 48 cores has been tested which despite losing out to AMD’s Milan shows decent performance improvements.

Specifications

The Xeon Platinum 8648 from the ‘Sapphire Rapids’ lineup features 48 cores / 96 threads. In the cache department, the CPU ships with 105MB of L3 Cache and has a TDP of 350W. The CPU was tested in a dual-socket configuration doubling the core/thread count.

Performance Metrics

Coming straight to the numbers from HXL, we see the 8648 score 1351 points in the single core test and 90411 points in multi-core testing. Being packed with 48 cores / 96 threads paired with the 10nm process node, this CPU packs a punch. 

This indeed is a bit slower than the MIlan CPUs from AMD, which score somewhere around ~95,000 points. However, the final clocks may boost this score making these CPUs on-par with AMD’s Milan. 

This is indeed a major step up from last-gen. Besides, the EPYC 7763 (Fastest Milan CPU) features 32 more cores.

V-Ray Testing

Moving onto V-Ray, the 8468 from team blue scores 85,766 vsamples. V-Ray states that the CPU is running in a 4-socket configuration but in reality this is a 2-socket setup. The clocks are rated a bit higher at 2.96GHz.

To put that into perspective, this score is shy of the EPYC 7763 by around 10–12%.

Release Date

These Sapphire Rapids CPUs are planned for 2023. However, by then we will see AMD’s Genoa-X and Bergamo CPUs. In comparison to Milan and Milan-X, these CPUs do perform well. Although, a last-Gen CPU cannot possibly compete with a newer generation.