Intel Xeon Gold 5117 Benchmarks and Review Why Bother

Today we have an interesting chip. The Intel Xeon Gold 5117 is a 14 core Intel Xeon Scalable chip that features lower clock speeds. We find the Intel Xeon Gold 5117 interesting for a few reasons. First, it is arguably an upgrade over the Intel Xeon Silver 4116 12-core part that features higher clock speeds but two less cores and a lower TDP. It is also similar to the Intel Xeon Gold 5119T part with the same base core count but diverging base and turbo clock speeds. Overall, it is a fascinating chip to have in our comparison set as it shows just how nuanced the Intel Xeon Scalable SKUs have gotten with the Skylake-SP generation.

Key stats for the Intel Xeon Gold 5117: 14 cores / 28 threads, 2.0GHz base and 2.8GHz turbo with 19.25MB L3 cache. The CPU features a 105W TDP. Here is the ARK page with the feature set.

Here is what the lscpu output looks like for the chips:

We wanted to look at a relatively similar chip, the Intel Xeon Gold 5119T which has a lower base clock and higher turbo clock. It also features the same core count and cache as the Xeon Gold 5117 and a lower TDP. You can find the ARK comparison here. You can also read more about the comparison part in our Dual Intel Xeon Gold 5119T Review: Lowest Power 14 Core On the Market. Going into this exercise, we thought it would be too close to call.

Test Configuration

Here is our basic test configuration for single-socket Xeon Scalable systems:

• Motherboard: Supermicro X11SPH-nCTF
• CPU: Intel Xeon Gold 5117
• RAM: 6x 16GB DDR4-2400 RDIMMs (Micron)
• SSD: Intel DC S3710 400GB
• SATADOM: Supermicro 32GB SATADOM

Realistically, we expect these to be deployed in dual socket scenarios. We wanted to quickly generate a large number of test results so we are going through a series of single socket results first. This is a decent system with 96GB of RAM but it can be expanded to 768GB as needs arise. The other important aspect is that we are keeping this test system stable and consistent for our benchmarking so we can have reliable power and performance numbers. Our readers often wonder, “which CPU should I get?” and that question often has three parts:

1. What is the cost?
2. What is the performance?
3. What is the impact to the price/ performance ratio of my applications?

Our goal with this series is to help our readers understand a relative performance ranking between CPUs. That way if you see two options in your configurator or from a sales rep quote, you have some idea of what you are getting with each option.

Next, we are going to look at the Intel Xeon Gold 5117 benchmarks. After that, we are going to discuss power consumption as well as market positioning before concluding with our final thoughts.