Linux benchmarking website Phoronix has taken Intel’s 5th Generation Xeon Emerald Rapids scalable CPU out for a spin to see how much faster it runs with AVX-512 instructions, and the result was a doubling in average performance. Some workloads even saw performance boosts over ten times without substantially increasing power consumption.
Phoronix performed its tests using a server with two of Intel’s top-end Xeon Platinum 8592+ 64-core CPUs, 1TB of DDR5 memory, a 3TB SSD, and running on the Intel Eagle Stream with the Ubuntu Linux distro. The publication benchmarked various workloads, such as Embree, OpenVKL, and Y-Cruncher, and enabled AVX-512 to double performance on average.
Much of this average rested on performance results in OpenVINO, which Phoronix tested multiple times with different parameters. Most of the OpenVINO run with AVX-512 showed performance boosts of at least two times, with the fastest result being over ten times faster. This is primarily thanks to OpenVINO supporting AVX-VNNI and BF16, which is especially useful for AI workloads. The difference in peak frequency with AVX-512 enabled and disabled was minimal. With it on, the Xeon Platinum 8592+ hit 2.95 GHz on all cores compared to 3.01 GHz when AVX-512 was off. The 64-core Emerald Rapids chip hit the 3.9 GHz boost clock regardless of whether AVX-512 was on or off.
On average, power usage didn’t change with or without AVX-512, though many individual workloads required up to 10% more power. The maximum power consumption was about 120 watts higher, which is somewhat typical given that it’s hard to gain free performance for no tradeoff. That higher power draw also meant slightly hotter temperatures. Additionally, turning on AVX-512 slightly decreased the frequency, which can result from higher power draw and higher temperatures.
Support for a wide spread of AVX-512 instructions is a primary selling point of Emerald Rapids. Although the CPU loses out to AMD’s 4th Generation EPYC Genoa chip with 96 cores in raw performance, as seen in our Emerald Rapids review, AVX instructions can change the dynamic between Intel and AMD’s server CPUs, especially for AI. It’s one of the probable reasons Microsoft chose last-generation Sapphire Rapids chips over EPYC to pair with AMD’s MI300X GPUs.
