Intel Xeon Gold 6148 Benchmarks and Review The Go-To HPC Chip

Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6148 Power Consumption

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

• Idle: 99W
• 70% Load: 427W
• 100% Load: 481W
• Peak: 556W

Note these results were taken using a 208V Schneider Electric / APC PDU at 17.6C 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 6148 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 6148 v. Intel Xeon

What makes the Intel Xeon Gold 6148 intriguing is that it is a 20% base clock increase over the Intel Xeon Gold 6138 SKUs. The parts are fast and have plenty of cores. If you are in a per-core licensing model, the Intel Xeon Gold 6136 is the better option. If you are on a per-socket or per server licensing model, having 20 cores and a relatively low 125W TDP means this is an efficient part. Likewise, one can save on per socket licensing (e.g. VMware) by upgrading from dual Intel Xeon Silver CPUs to a single Intel Xeon Gold 6138.

Intel Xeon Gold 6148 v. AMD EPYC

When it comes to AMD EPYC, the 20 core Intel Xeon Gold 6148 sits between the 24 core AMD EPYC 7451 and the 32 core AMD EPYC 7501 parts in terms of pricing. For purely single socket applications the AMD EPYC 7551P is a unique value with 32 cores yet at lower clock speeds for a 25% discount. We think most will use these in dual socket configurations. The major advantage the Intel Xeon Gold 6148 has is lower power consumption. The AMD EPYC chips trade higher power consumption for performance which makes sense. The Intel Xeon Gold 6148 has lower power consumption while showing a similar level of performance.

Final Words

With the first generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and especially for those implementing OPA100 (Omni-Path 100Gbps) the Intel Xeon Gold 6148 has been a popular SKU, especially the Xeon Gold 6148F. Generally, these chips are found in HPC servers. Intel has SKUs that are better suited to per-core licensing applications.

One can also see the generational improvement. The chips are about 8% less expensive than the Intel Xeon E5-2698 V4 and show better performance across the board due to the increased clock speed and new microarchitecture/ cache architecture. AMD is able to win performance duels in many cases using 32 core parts starting at around 20% more than the Intel Xeon Gold 6148. There are a number of cases where the Intel Xeon Gold 6148 is making up for a 20% core deficit against the EPYC 24 core parts using higher clock speeds and one-quarter of the NUMA nodes.