Intel Xeon W-3175X, hot drummer. Testing

Over the last couple of weeks, several news came out related to the Intel Xeon W-3175X processor - thus the “homemade Xeon” , with 28 cores and 56 threads. First of all, the processor itself appeared; after some confusion with positioning (for general sale or only in joint projects with OEM manufacturers) and cost (the most varied options from $ 3000 to $ 8000 were called), 3175X suddenly appeared quietly on the windows of online stores, and not anywhere, but in Japan, priced at about $ 4,000. Further, the discussion turned into a practical course: several of the largest specialized sites conducted their own tests of Intel Xeon W-3175X - in order to exhaust the topic, we suggest to get acquainted with them briefly.

Immediately after the release, the W-3175X was called a monster among home processors - and there were good reasons for this. Here again, its main characteristics. Literally each, so to speak, inspires respect.

Frequency	3.1 / 4.3 GHz
Cores / Threads	28/56
Tdp	255 W
Cache	38.5 MB
Memory	Up to 512 GB DDR4 ECC
PCIe lines	44

Intel Xeon W-3175X stands out not only for its characteristics, but also for its physical dimensions. The comparative photo below shows that its packaging is much larger than that of home processors and is similar in size to AMD Threadripper and EPYC.


Top row: AMD Opteron 6127, AMD Opteron 180, AMD Threadripper, AMD Duron 900
Middle row: AMD Ryzen 2700X, Intel Core i9-9900K
Bottom row: AMD EPYC 7551, Intel Xeon W-3175X, Intel i9-9980XE, Intel i7-930

We now turn to the results of the tests. A small preface. On the graphs below you will see two lines each showing the characteristics of the W-3175X: orange and red, signed by Intel Spec. The difference between them is as follows: the second is processor performance at power settings recommended by Intel; the first is that with the restrictions on power and current removed. It is easy to assume that the orange line will almost always be longer, although there are some nuances here.

The second (after the price) question that interested everyone was the power consumption of this monster. The plausibility of a spherical TDP of 255 W in vacuum with so many cores was questioned by many (who are interested in which parrots should be used to measure processor power consumption, we recommend the very informative article Anandtech ), and the estimated real numbers sparked the imagination - figures were up to 500 watts inclusive. In reality, everything turned out to be somewhat more modest, although all the same, the Intel Xeon W-3175X was ahead of the rest.



So, with a full nominal load of all 28 cores, the processor consumes 280 W with a tail, while its temperature reached 110 C (unlike most models, the thermal throttling limit in this case is 120 C). We now turn to overclocking. Here is a picture of power consumption with a gradual acceleration from 4.0 to 4.5 GHz, the CineBench test is used as a load (the test results in brackets).



As you can see, the smallest overclocking drives consumption to the skies. In this test, a further increase in the frequency was not made, as they reached the limit of the performance of the cooling system. But, seeing the trend, it is easy to imagine kilowatts and more on this graph. Surely, in the very near future we will receive reports on the most hellish stress tests of this processor, so there will truly be "who is more."

We now turn to performance. Here the situation is standard: a large number of cores warm the soul and the cooling radiator, but are converted into conditional parrots only if the load can be broadly parallelized; since this possibility is always finite, the result in any test of the revolution will not produce. Anandtech experts launched dozens of different benchmarks , system, office, gaming, and so on. But the picture as a whole is illustrated by any arbitrary set of tests. Choose your favorite.









Intel Xeon W-3175X is almost always in the top - and this is not surprising. But at the same time, its indicators are statistically almost indistinguishable from the characteristics of the same Core i9 of the last generation, despite the fact that they have two times less cores, consumption and price. Not in favor of the W-3175X and the situation with the components. Today, there is one compatible ASUS Dominus Extreme motherboard, another Gigabyte model somewhere on the way to the market. Needless to say, they are not cheap. In total, the Anandtech test stand costs $ 7,000 and, let me remind you, it is not intended for overclocking.

So who might be interested in the Intel Xeon W-3175X? It seems that those who for some specific tasks lack the performance of processors like Core i9-9980XE. I have no doubt that such tasks requiring a large number of threads exist. Also I am sure that in some cases the costs described above are less significant than the resulting increase. And, most definitely, there will be few such cases.

In this regard, I would like to arrange a survey.