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

AMD Milan and Intel Ice Lake are still suitable for a range of HPC workloads, but of course, if wanting to maximize your performance is where Intel Sapphire Rapids and AMD Genoa really push things further with DDR5, AVX-512 with Zen 4, Intel AMX with Sapphire Rapids, etc. See the other Phoronix benchmarks of these new processors or wait for the follow-up SPR/Genoa data center article for more benchmarks.

With the NAMD molecular dynamics software it was a competitive race between these Milan and Ice Lake processors when it came to the raw performance in this common HPC workload.

When looking at the performance-per-dollar, it was a very competitive race still with today's prices.

But where the AMD EPYC processors had a more decisive advantage was when looking at the total CPU power consumption as well as the overall total server power consumption of each configuration.

With nekRS as another HPC benchmark, AMD continued to show greater power efficiency compared to the tested Intel Ice Lake processors.

And a quick look at GROMACS.