Not everyone buys $4,000 CPUs in their systems. A large number of servers are purchased with CPUs in the $500 range, which is where the Intel Xeon Silver 4210 sits in the current Intel stack. In this price band, the new 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable series saw massive generation-on-generation performance gains. While the microarchitecture gains are minimal, these chips get 100MHz base and 200MHz turbo clock increases. Perhaps the bigger news is an increase in cores and threads from 8 and 16 to 10 and 20 in this generation. 25% more cores and threads coupled with a ~5% or more clock increase across those cores is a recipe for a great story.
Key stats for the Intel Xeon Silver 4210: 10 cores / 20 threads with a 2.2GHz base clock and 3.2GHz turbo boost. There is 14MB of onboard cache. The CPU features an 85W TDP. These are $501 list price parts. Here is the ARK page with the feature set.
Here is what the lscpu output looks like for an Intel Xeon Silver 4210:
Intel Xeon Silver 4210 Test Configuration
For our 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable CPU single socket reviews, we are using the following configuration:
- System: HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10
- CPU: Intel Xeon Silver 4210
- RAM: 6x 32GB DDR4-2400 ECC RDIMMs
- Storage: 1x Intel DC S3700 400GB
- PCIe Networking: Mellanox ConnectX-3 HPE FlexLOM dual-port 40GbE
The Intel Xeon Silver 4200 series only supports DDR4-2400 speeds. That is significantly lower than the DDR4-2933 speeds that higher-end Gold and Platinum SKUs support. We covered the test system in more detail in our article A New STH 1P 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Test Platform including the process we went through to select the heatsinks and fans.
One will notice that we are using the high-performance heatsink here with the high-performance fans. That is to ensure that even though we are using a 1U server, we have enough cooling capacity for our testing. If you purchase a new ProLiant DL360 Gen10 you will likely get a standard heatsink which is more than ample to cool a low-power part like this. You can see the difference between the high-performance and standard HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 heatsinks here:
Next, we are going to take a look at our Intel Xeon Silver 4210 benchmarks. We are then going to conclude with our market comparison and final words on the processors.
