AVX-512 Performance Comparison: AMD Genoa vs. Intel Sapphire Rapids & Ice Lake

For the LeelaChessZero chess engine powered via neural networks, Sapphire Rapids enjoyed a larger relative performance boost with AVX-512 enabled than Ice Lake or Genoa. In this case it was also enough to push the Xeon Platinum 8490H 2P ahead of the EPYC 9654 2P.

Though in the case of performance-per-Watt, AMD Genoa was well ahead of Sapphire Rapids with AVX-512 for Lczero.

With Intel's Embree ray-tracing kernel library enabling AVX-512 on Ice Lake netted a 10% improvement while with Sapphire Rapids was a 35% improvement. In the case of the EPYC 9654 AVX-512 uplift it came in at 20%.

With Embree AVX-512 on Ice Lake you can see where the peak frequency is severely impacted compared to without AVX-512, but was not the case for Sapphire Rapids or Genoa.

Embree's AVX-512 use on Ice Lake also led to higher CPU core temperatures while with Sapphire Rapids and Genoa it was actually lower when using the AVX-512 path.

Embree does a nice job showing the improved AVX-512 with Sapphire Rapids compared to the prior flagship 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors.