Intel Xeon Gold 6138 Benchmarks and Review 20 Power Efficient Cores

The Intel Xeon Gold 6138 is a great option for many servers. It comes with 20 cores and 40 threads which tally 67% more than the Intel Xeon Gold 6136. It is able to fit these 20 cores in a 125W TDP which is impressive given an 8 core Intel Xeon Silver 4110 has an 85W TDP. As part of the Intel Xeon Gold 6100 series, it has turbo clocks up to 3.7GHz for bursts of single threaded performance. As we are going to see, this is a great option in the Intel Xeon Scalable line.

Key stats for the Intel Xeon Gold 6138: 20 cores / 40 threads, 2.0GHz base and 3.7GHz turbo with 27.5MB L3 cache. The CPU features a 125W TDP. This is a $2600 price point Intel has maintained for years. Here is the ARK page with the feature set.

Here is what the lscpu output looks like for the chips:

Test Configuration

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

• Motherboard: Supermicro X11SPH-nCTF
• CPU: Intel Xeon Gold 6138
• RAM: 6x 16GB DDR4-2666 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.