Intel Xeon w7-2595x Review: All P-Core Pro Workstation Power
Running AI workloads natively on local hardware, or at the edge instead of in the cloud, is just now emerging on mainstream PCs. As a result, reliable, easily repeatable benchmarks for these workloads aren't prolific just yet, though UL has already built a few into its Procyon benchmark suite.
UL Procyon AI Machine Vision Benchmark
Let's take a look at how these processors do with the UL Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark, running solely on the CPU cores using Integer precision. Though many mobile processors like the the Zen 5-based Ryzen AI 300 series, Meteor Lake Core Ultra, and Snapdragon X processors feature an NPU, Sapphire Rapids and most other desktop processors do not, hence all of these tests are being run on the CPU cores alone.
Procyon's computer vision benchmark is affected by memory and core-to-core latency, available memory bandwidth, cache size and latency, and compute capacity. Even with that knowledge, making sense of these results is difficult -- results are all over the map. Looks at the Xeon w7-2595X specifically, it clearly outruns its predecessors and finishes right in the mix with some of the better performing chips, but it doesn't standout in any meaningful way.
Procyon's computer vision benchmark is affected by memory and core-to-core latency, available memory bandwidth, cache size and latency, and compute capacity. Even with that knowledge, making sense of these results is difficult -- results are all over the map. Looks at the Xeon w7-2595X specifically, it clearly outruns its predecessors and finishes right in the mix with some of the better performing chips, but it doesn't standout in any meaningful way.
LAME XP Audio Encoding
In our custom LAME XP MP3 encoding test, we convert 16, large uncompressed WAV files to the MP3 format, which is a common use case for many end users, to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. The LAME engine is an open-source MP3 audio encoder that is used widely in a multitude of third party applications. For this test, we created 16-copies of our own 223MB WAV file (an 11 minute Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME XP tool. Processing times are recorded below, listed in minutes:seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.
The Xeon w7-2595X performed particularly well in our custom audio encoding test. Because this one tops out with 32-threads, having many additional cores doesn't necessarily help. And because the Xeon w7-2595X has some additional headroom and can run at higher speeds with multi-threaded workloads versus the previous-gen Xeon w9-3495X (56-core), it outpaces its counterpart by a small margin.
Blackmagic RAW Video Encoding Speed
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests full-resolution Blackmagic RAW video decode performance. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both using 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.
The Blackmagic Speed Test loves compute resources and memory bandwidth. Here, the Intel Xeon w7-2595X performs exceptionally well given its core count, outpacing the 56-Core Xeon w9-3495X and trailing only the 32-Core Threadripper.
The Blackmagic Speed Test loves compute resources and memory bandwidth. Here, the Intel Xeon w7-2595X performs exceptionally well given its core count, outpacing the 56-Core Xeon w9-3495X and trailing only the 32-Core Threadripper.
Cinebench 2024 Rendering Benchmark
Cinebench rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which makes it an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graphs below.
There's no catching the Xeon w9-3495X in Cinebench 2024, but once again we see a strong performance by the Xeon w7-2595X. In this 3D rendering workload, only the higher core count processors offer more performance in the multi-threaded test. Single thread performance, however, is the lowest of the bunch for the Xeon W processors.
POV-Ray CPU Ray Tracing Benchmark
POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.
POV-Ray tells a somewhat different story than Cinebench. Here, the Xeon w7-2595X lands in the same position when ranked by multi-threaded performance, but the Threadripper 7970X and Xeon w9-3495X trade slots. In POV-Ray, the lowest single-thread results belong to the AMD processors and the Xeon w7-2595X moves up a few rungs.
Blender Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, and animation to simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking. It has a purpose-built benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model (or models). We used the CPU-focused benchmark with all three models currently available...
Once again we see the Xeon w7-2595X outperforming all of the mainstream processors and clearly outrunning its previous-gen counterpart, the Xeon w7-2495X. Only the higher-core count processors offer more performance here.
Y-Cruncher Multi-Threaded Pi Calculator
Y-Cruncher is a multi-core-capable tool that calculates the value of pi to a specified number of digits. In this case, we ran the tool on all threads and had the application calculate the value of pi to 1 billion digits. The values below are the time required to perform the calculation expressed in seconds. As a result, lower values indicate better performance.
Intel's Xeon W processors dominate this test, with the Xeon w7-2595X landing right in-between its previous-gen counterparts. There was no catching the w9-3495X, but the Xeon w7-2595X shaved over a second off of the previous-gen Xeon w7-2495X's time.
Intel's Xeon W processors dominate this test, with the Xeon w7-2595X landing right in-between its previous-gen counterparts. There was no catching the w9-3495X, but the Xeon w7-2595X shaved over a second off of the previous-gen Xeon w7-2495X's time.
