Intel Xeon Gold 6136 Benchmarks and Review 12 High-Speed Cores

Intel Xeon Gold 6136 Power Consumption

We wanted to post a few figures from our testing that show the real selling point of the chips, low power.

• Idle: 77W
• 70% Load: 231W
• 100% Load: 271W
• Peak: 288W

Note these results were taken using a 208V Schneider Electric / APC PDU at 17.8C and 71% RH. Our testing window shown here had a +/- 0.3C and +/- 2% RH variance. These are great power consumption figures. These are certainly solid results for this system and a large amount of the power is not used by the CPU and instead by the RAM and peripherals.

Intel Xeon Gold 6136 Market Positioning

Thes chips are not released in a vacuum instead, they have competition on both the Intel and AMD sides. When you purchase a server and select a CPU, it is important to see the value of a platform versus its competitors.

Intel Xeon Gold 6136 v. Intel Xeon

You can get a 12-core Intel Xeon CPU with this generation for about half of what the Intel Xeon Gold 6136 costs (e.g. the Intel Xeon Silver 4116.) For twice the price you get all core base frequencies that top out at 3.0GHz, the same as the maximum Turbo speeds on the Silver 4116. You also get features like dual port FMA which makes AVX-512 fly. RAM speed is bumped from DDR4-2400 to DDR4-2666 or by about 10%. While you pay twice as much, in the context of many systems, the extra price is justified.

On the other hand, this is still a per-core license cost optimized SKU much like the Intel Xeon Gold 6134 we recently reviewed. If you just want more cores, Intel has other options in this price range which are excellent.

If you are evaluating this for a single or dual socket purchase versus the Intel Xeon Platinum 8158, performance is the same. Save $9K on your dual socket system and buy these instead. The Platinum 8158 is targeted and priced for 8 socket systems.

Intel Xeon Gold 6136 v. AMD EPYC

When it comes to AMD EPYC, like the Intel Xeon Gold 6134 this is intended for a different market. On a per-core basis, the Intel Xeon Gold 6136 utilizes high clock speeds and lots of cache to maintain an advantage. AMD EPYC can give you more cores at this price point, and therefore more aggregate performance in many workloads, but if you have four-figure licensing per core, the Intel Xeon Gold 6136 can look like a relative bargain.

Final Words

With the high clock speeds of the Intel Xeon Gold 6136 you are making some tradeoffs. For example, you do not get the same core count as you would with other Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC options. You also lose the precision of the Intel Xeon Gold 6134’s mission of being a low core count, high-frequency part by dropping the base clock to 3.0GHz. At the same time, if you think the 8-core part is too low, the Intel Xeon Gold 6136 is an intriguing step up in the portfolio that you should look into. On the other hand, if you just want lots of cores, and do not care about clock speeds, then other options are plentiful in the server space. Twelve cores in 2018 is not a lot so we recommend it only if you are bound by per-core licensing costs.