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

With the cpuminer-opt miner and the scrypt algorithm, engaging AVX-512 on Sapphire Rapids yielded a 2.25x improvement on Sapphire Rapids compared to 2.0x on Ice Lake or 1.63x the performance with Genoa -- but the AMD EPYC 9654 server was overall delivering the best performance.

The peak CPU frequency impact was less with Sapphire Rapids compared to Ice Lake.

Cpuminer-opt was one of the rare cases where AVX-512 use did drive up power use significantly for Genoa and Sapphire Rapids processors.

In other Cpuminer-opt benchmarks too, the Sapphire Rapids AVX-512 uplift was relatively larger than what was seen with Ice Lake.

For some of the cpuminer-opt algorithms, the double pumped AVX-512 implementation with Zen 4 / Genoa hadn't yielded any improvement.