Performance Modeling, Benchmarking and Simulation of High Performance Computer Systems

11:10 - 11:30
Benchmarking the Evolution of Performance and Energy Efficiency Across Recent Generations of Intel Xeon Processors

István Z. Reguly, Balázs Drávai
Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary

In the span of 1.5 years, Intel has launched four families of Xeon processors, with some novel architectural features. First, the Sapphire Rapids generation, which featured a version with on-package HBM; next, the Emerald Rapids generation; and then Intel differentiated by releasing the performance-oriented Granite Rapids and the efficiency-oriented Sierra Forest families. In this work, we evaluate the performance and efficiency of CPUs from each of these generations and variants, with a particular focus on bandwidth-bound high performance computing (HPC) applications. We contrast runtime and energy consumption figures and track trends across generations.