Intel Xeon Gold 5120 Benchmarks and Review New Level of Redundancy

Our Intel Xeon Gold 5120 benchmark and review piece feels a bit like deja vu. This part is now the third 14 core Intel Xeon Gold 5100 series CPU that we have tested. All three SKUs will have between 1.9GHz and 2.2GHz base clocks and 2.8 to 3.2GHz turbo clocks. The Intel Xeon 5100 series 14 core SKUs are an exercise in unnecessary segmentation as you are going to see some shockingly similar results.

Key stats for the Intel Xeon Gold 5120: 14 cores / 28 threads, 2.2GHz base and 3.2GHz turbo with 19.25MB L3 cache. The CPU features a 105W TDP. Here is the ARK page with the feature set.

We were originally going to publish these numbers in a few weeks. After seeing the results of the three similar Intel Xeon Gold 5120 chips, we decided to pull this piece up a few weeks. During this review, we will show why this chip is similar to the Intel Xeon Gold 5117 and Xeon Gold 5119T. The advantage of our “Project Xavier” CPU benchmarking project is that we have more than half of the Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake-SP) and all of the AMD EPYC CPU results in our database so seeing trends like these are relatively easy.

Test Configuration

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

• Motherboard: Supermicro X11SPH-nCTF
• CPU: Intel Xeon Gold 5120
• 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 5120 benchmarks. After that, we are going to discuss power consumption as well as market positioning before concluding with our final thoughts.