Quad Intel Xeon Gold 6242 Benchmarks and Review

Today we have our review of a quad socket Intel Xeon Gold 6242 solution. These are chips that are designed for high clock speeds across relatively few threads. Instead of boasting 24+ cores per CPU, the Intel Xeon Gold 6242 is a frequency optimized part that delivers 16 cores at 2.8GHz to 3.9GHz. As an Intel Xeon Gold 6200 series processor, these are designed for systems up to 4-socket configurations, so that is the configuration we are testing here.

Key stats for the Intel Xeon Gold 6242: 16 cores / 32 threads and 2.8GHz base clock and 3.9GHz turbo boost with 22MB cache. The CPU features a 150W TDP. These are $2529 list price parts. Here is the ARK page with the feature set.

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

As you can see, the 4P configuration yields 16 cores * 2 threads per core * 4 CPUs = 128 threads. Each CPU is its own NUMA node which is a big benefit over the AMD EPYC 7371. The AMD EPYC 7371 is less expensive and has more memory bandwidth and PCIe I/O but it can only scale to dual socket configurations.

Quad Intel Xeon Gold 6242 Test Configuration

For our 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable CPU quad socket reviews, we are using the following configuration:

• System: Supemicro SYS-2049U-TR4
• CPU: Intel Xeon Gold 6242
• RAM: 48x 32GB DDR4-2933 ECC RDIMMs
• Storage: 4x Seagate Exos 2TB 2.5″, 2x Samsung 960GB U.2 NVMe SSDs, 128GB Supermicro SATA DOM
• PCIe Networking: Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx 25GbE, Intel X710 4x 10GbE SFP+

A quick note here, we did not utilize the Intel Optane DCPMM here because we had standard chips. Using Intel Optane DCPMM even with two 128GB modules per CPU to stay well below the 1TB per CPU memory limit would have meant our memory would work at only DDR4-2666 speeds.

You can learn more about the test server in our Supermicro SYS-2049U-TR4 review. Upgrading the server from our first generation to the second generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors simply required a BIOS update. In newer systems, the platform will come standard with that support.

Overall, the platform has support for an enormous amount of I/O and storage customization options. With four Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs, one has a maximum of 192 PCIe lanes available connected to the system which is twice what one has in a traditional dual socket server. Scaling up is a key value proposition of the Intel Xeon Gold 6xxx and Platinum 8xxx families.

Next, we are going to take a look at our quad Intel Xeon Gold 6242 benchmarks, we are then going to focus on power consumption then conclude with our final words on the processors.