Intel Xeon Ice Lake vs. AMD EPYC Milan Server Performance, Efficiency & Value In 2023

Those interested in seeing nearly 150 benchmarks in total from all of these tested AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Scalable server processors can find the raw result page with all of my collected data. Plus the power, performance-per-dollar, and CPU frequency data to go along with each result.

For those curious about the peak CPU frequency achieved out of any of the cores, every second for the entire duration of the benchmarking, here is your look at that data.

Similarly, here is the total CPU power consumption across all of the benchmarks carried out in this testing. The CPU power consumption data is collected from the PowerCap / RAPL sysfs interfaces. The AMD Milan processors easily deliver the greatest power efficiency over the Intel Ice Lake processors, similar to test results of EPYC/Xeon hardware locally at Phoronix.

Lastly a look at the total server power consumption (wall power) across the entire span of benchmarks carried out. These readings are based on what was provided in real-time by the PDU connected to each server.

From this testing, AMD EPYC Milan easily led over Intel Ice Lake when it came to delivering the best performance-per-Watt. However, given all of my past testing of EPYC Milan(X) that should hardly be a surprise. AMD also generally "takes the cake" when it comes to the best value / performance-per-dollar. Intel meanwhile led in raw performance when it came to some workloads like single-threaded PHP processing and the PostgreSQL database server and then predominantly for software able to make effective use of AVX-512. Intel Ice Lake obviously came out ahead of AMD Milan in such cases of being able to leverage AVX-512, but thankfully AMD Zen 4 with 4th Gen EPYC brings a performant and power efficient AVX-512 implementation there, as I've already shown in several articles on Phoronix. Intel also ups the competition with Sapphire Rapids by introducing Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) that can be very beneficial in some AI workloads but so far the software adoption of AMX is still in its early stages.

In any case hopefully you found this AMD Milan vs. Intel Ice Lake server performance comparison look in 2023 interesting if you are considering these generation-old options for better availability and pricing. This will be complemented later by adding in the latest-generation Intel and AMD server offerings for showing the data center performance competition and generational uplift from each vendor.

Again, go here if wanting to look at even more data or curious about particular workload(s) or areas of interest. Thanks again to Serve The World and Nextron for providing the free remote access for carrying out these tests on the range of server processors.