Intel Xeon Gold 6152 Benchmarks and Review Top Core Count Xeon Gold

Intel Xeon Gold 6152 Power Consumption

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

• Idle: 77W
• 70% Load: 218W
• 100% Load: 259W
• Peak: 271W

These results are in-line with what we would expect from such as system and show a consolidation benefit of a single versus dual socket system.

Note these results were taken using a 208V Schneider Electric / APC PDU at 17.6C and 71% RH. Our testing window shown here had a +/- 0.3C and +/- 2% RH variance.

Intel Xeon Gold 6152 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 6152 v. Intel Xeon

Perhaps the biggest question here is whether the Intel Xeon Gold 6152 pricing is worth the additional clock speed and two extra cores over the Intel Xeon Gold 6138. There is another model, the Intel Xeon Gold 6148 which is around $600 less expensive than the Gold 6152 but the Gold 6138 is around $1050 per chip less expensive. If you think your servers are going to be in the category where you need a lot of cores but the general load is going to be in the 30-50% range, there is an opportunity for cost savings.

One item that we wish the Intel Xeon Gold 6152 had was a 24 core count. That would have put the top of the Intel Xeon Gold 6100 range above the Intel Xeon E5-2699 V4 in terms of raw cores. One can get 24 cores by moving to Xeon Platinum, but the Platinum SKUs blur into market segments that were once dominated by the Intel Xeon E7 range.

Intel Xeon Gold 6152 v. AMD EPYC

Comparing the Intel Xeon Gold 6152 to the AMD EPYC 7000 line is hard. In the price range, the AMD EPYC 32 core parts generally perform better than the 22 core Intel Xeon Gold 6152. If you can live with the NUMA node and Infinity Fabric setup, then the AMD EPYC 7451 or 7401P are attractive even in single socket configurations like we were testing here.

If you are in a per-core licensing regime, you probably will skip AMD EPYC and the Gold 6152 in favor of the Gold 6154 as an example. There are savings on a per-core basis in most applications for Xeon Gold, but Intel has specific SKUs for that application so we are not sure a Xeon Gold 6152 v. AMD EPYC comparison is warranted here.

This is certainly an area where the Intel Xeon value proposition runs directly into the wall that is AMD EPYC.

Final Words

Overall, the Intel Xeon Gold 6152 is the highest core count Xeon Gold 6100 series CPU in the Skylake-SP generation. It has more cores than its higher clocked Xeon Gold 6154 sibling and equals the Intel Xeon E5-2699 V4 core counts. If you have software that can utilize AVX-512, then the Intel Xeon Gold 6152 has an even stronger value proposition. This is a segment of the market with heavy AMD EPYC competition so we can see the dogfight happening between AMD and Intel here over the next few generations.