Intel Xeon Gold 6240 Benchmarks and Review

With the Intel Xeon Gold 6240, there is a lot to like. The part has high clock speeds combined with a solid core count standing at 18 cores. List price-wise, it is less than a quarter of the price of the flagship Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 which makes it a relative value for the core count it provides. In our review, we are going to see how Intel’s segmentation making this a medium core count but higher clock speed part impacts benchmarks and overall performance.

Key stats for the Intel Xeon Gold 6240: 18 cores / 36 threads with a 2.6GHz base clock and 3.9GHz turbo boost. There is 24.75MB of onboard cache. The CPU features a 150W TDP. These are $2451 list price parts. Here is the ARK page with the feature set.

Here is what the lscpu output looks like for an Intel Xeon Gold 6240:

We wanted to quickly note here that the Intel Xeon Gold 6240 also scales up to 4-socket server designs. We did not have four CPUs to test, but we did test neighboring chips, quad Intel Xeon Gold 6242, previously.

Intel Xeon Gold 6240 Test Configuration

For our 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable CPU single-socket reviews, we are using the following configuration:

• System: HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10
• CPU: Intel Xeon Gold 6240
• RAM: 6x 32GB DDR4-2933 ECC RDIMMs
• Storage: 1x Intel DC S3700 400GB
• PCIe Networking: Mellanox ConnectX-3 HPE FlexLOM dual-port 40GbE

The Intel Xeon Gold 6240 support DDR4-2933 speeds that only higher-end Gold and Platinum SKUs support. We covered the test system in more detail in our article A New STH 1P 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Test Platform including the process we went through to select the heatsinks and fans.

One will notice that we are using the high-performance heatsink here with the high-performance fans. That is to ensure that even though we are using a 1U server, we have enough cooling capacity for our testing. If you purchase a new ProLiant DL360 Gen10 you will likely get a standard heatsink which is more than ample to cool a low-power part like this. You can see the difference between the high-performance and standard HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 heatsinks here:

Next, we are going to take a look at our Xeon Gold 6240 benchmarks. We are then going to conclude with our market comparison and final words on the processors.