Intel Xeon Gold 6138 Benchmarks and Review 20 Power Efficient Cores

Intel Xeon Gold 6138 Power Consumption

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

• Idle: 75W
• 70% Load: 203W
• 100% Load: 232W
• Peak: 241W

Note these results were taken using a 208V Schneider Electric / APC PDU at 17.8C 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 6138 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 6138 v. Intel Xeon

In this price range, we really like 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 6138 v. AMD EPYC

When it comes to AMD EPYC, the 20 core Intel Xeon Gold 6138 beats EPYC 24 core parts in some of our workloads and falls behind EPYC in others. For purely single socket applications the AMD EPYC 7401P is a unique value. We think most will use these in dual socket configurations. The major advantage the Intel Xeon Gold 6138 has is lower power consumption. The AMD EPYC chips trade higher power consumption for performance which makes sense. The Intel Xeon Gold 6138 has lower power consumption while showing a similar level of performance.

Final Words

There are a lot of things to like about the Intel Xeon Gold 6138 offering. The CPUs have 20 cores in a 125W TDP footprint which is easy to cool even in dense servers. The 20 cores / 40 threads is more than anything in the Intel Xeon E5 V3 (Haswell-EP) generation and the previous generation Xeon E5 V4 (Broadwell-EP) only beat this core count by 10% at the top end. At the same time, it offers consolidation benefits over dual Intel Xeon Silver 4110 or Silver 4114 CPUs. Compared to EPYC, it lacks cores, memory capacity, and PCIe lanes versus the similarly priced AMD EPYC 7451 in a single socket configuration, but offers the benefits of a single NUMA node and lower power consumption. In the Intel Xeon Gold 613x range, if you are not in a per-core licensing model, this is a great processor to look at when configuring servers.