Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6154 Processor Review, Consumer Tested

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how an enterprise-grade CPU does with consumer workloads? Well, today you will find out just that. We take two Intel Xeon Scalable processors, two Xeon Gold 6154 processors, run some workstation benchmarks, and then some more consumer-facing benchmarks.

The CPUs are pitted against the latest and greatest CPUs from Intel and AMD in benchmarks such as CINEBENCH, SuperPI, and even 3DMark. We also do compare it to a previous generation dual Xeon system and an AMD EPYC system, although the EPYC system uses only a single CPU.

Specifications

We won't be going into crazy depth about the microarchitecture of the CPU, but we will cover some basics. The CPUs each have 18 cores and 36 threads, and all cores are connected through the mesh architecture instead of a ring bus, which is much better for heavily multi-core CPUs.

The CPUs are built on 14nm lithography, and both CPUs have a 3GHz base clock and a 3.7GHz turbo frequency. The TDP of each CPU is 200W. The CPU has three UPI links and is capable of scaling up to four CPUs. Each CPU has 48 PCI-E lanes and supports up to 768GB of 2666MHz in six channels.

Surprisingly, the CPU doesn't support Optane Memory or Turbo Boost 3.0 like it's consumer Skylake-X counterparts, but it does support more manageability features. You also get support for AVX-512 (or called AVX3 sometimes).

Pricing

The Xeon Gold 6154 Processor costs $3543, which is a lot.