32-core (2x 16) Intel Ice Lake Server Geekbench benchmarks leak — 80% more performance than AMD Epyc Rome 7702P with half the cores?

Intel hasn't been particularly doing well with 10nm by its own admission, and we've seen the company taking time to scale the architecture beyond four cores. In fact, a higher core count on the consumer side may not be realized until Alder Lake debuts sometime next year. However, the situation seems to be different on the server side of things.

Famed leakster TUM_APISAK has discovered three Geekbench 4 entries for what appears to be an Ice Lake-SP Xeon CPU. The processor is not properly identified in the test, but there are some clues to point that these results belong to Ice Lake Server. Firstly, the CPU identifier indicates that this belongs to the Ice Lake family. Next, the listing indicates high amounts of RAM, Windows Server 2019 Datacenter edition as the OS, and a dual-socket architecture that is usually the realm of servers. 

While the base frequency is listed at 2.8 GHz, the maximum clock appears to be 3.2 GHz going by the .gb4 result. The base clock looks to be somewhat low indicating this could very well be an engineering sample. From the scores (attached below), we get to see much improved results over the Cascade Lake Xeon 6226, which scores 32,937 points in multi-core for a 2S 24-core 48-thread part.

These scores also appear to be higher than a dual-socket AMD Epyc 7702P (1 and 2) with 64 cores and 128 threads. Taking the highest scores into account, we see that Intel Ice Lake Server offers nearly an 80.4% performance improvement over the Epyc 7702P with half the number of cores.

A point to be noted here is that Epyc shows way higher scores in Geekbench 4 in Linux even with a 1S setup. So, a lot of factors can influence these scores and unless we get to see an Ice Lake Server Geekbench 4 benchmark running on Linux, it is not possible to make a definite conclusion.

AMD does have the edge when it comes to core counts, though. We see that Intel is only able to scale Ice Lake up to 2x 16 core (and up to 38 cores max) on the server side indicating that it will be some time before we get 64-core monsters from Team Blue.

Ice Lake Server will bring support for 64 lanes PCIe Gen4, 8-channel DDR4-3200 RAM, and will compete with the 7nm+ AMD Zen 3 Epyc Milan processors that are also slated to be available around the same time with up to 64 cores.