Intel’s next-gen Sierra Forest Xeon CPU featuring a mighty 144 E-cores has been leaked within the Geekbench database.
Intel’s Sierra Forest CPUs Will Feature E-Core Only Xeon Architecture, 144 Core and 288 Core Configurations Coming Next Year
Intel has given us a lot of details on its Sierra Forest Xeon CPUs which will be packing the Sierra Glen E-Core. This E-Core is an optimized version of the Crestmont core that will be incorporated within Meteor Lake & Arrow Lake client CPUs. The CPUs will come in 144 SP and 288 AP configs.
Now, we have the first appearance of the 144-core variant showing up within the Geekbench 6 benchmark database. This particular chip was running on the Beechnut City platform which is a reference evaluation platform featuring a 2S (Dual-Socket) design and supports 32 DDR5 DIMMs. The platform comes with the LGA 4677 socket, offering support for up to 350W CPU TPDs and up to 88 PCIe Gen5 lanes. Sierra Forest is expected to feature TDPs as low as 200W and will come in both 1S and 2S servers.
The particular Intel Sierra Forest Xeon CPU features 144 E-Cores, 144 threads, a base clock of 2.20 GHz, and lots of cache. There’s 108 MB of L3, 64 MB of L2, 4 MB of L1 Data & 9 MB of L1 Instruction cache. Since this is a 2S platform we are looking at, two chips were running which is why 288 cores are mentioned instead of 144 but the cache count makes it clear that each chip was a 144 E-Core SKU and not the top 288-core SKU which should be expected a bit later. Additionally, the CPU was running alongside a total of 256 GB of DDR5 memory.
As for the performance, it looks like this particular Intel Xeon Sierra Forest CPU platform was an early ES design based on single and multi-core performance. It is rather low and while the E-Core architecture should not be compared to the performance-oriented P-Core designs, we still expect 144 E-Cores to do much better than the results posted here.
These higher core count E-Core CPUs are aiming at the cloud data centers where AMD has positioned its Zen 4C-powered Bergamo lineup. The Bergamo lineup shares the same ISA as the Genoa CPUs & offers some impressive compute and efficiency. Intel will have +12.5% higher cores vs Genoa’s 128 cores but since the architecture is different, there aren’t any available threads. This gives Bergamo a major lead with 256 threads versus Sierra Forest’s 144-thread design. AMD EPYC CPUs also offer much higher cache than Sierra Forest with up to 384 MB pools on the top Bergamo SKU.
Based on the current Xeon roadmap, Intel’s 5th Gen Emerald Rapids CPUs will be launching next week on the 14th of December followed by Sierra Forest in the first half of 2024 and these will soon be followed by the P-Core powered Granite Rapids family.
News Source: Benchleaks