Intel's upcoming 5th Gen Xeon Emerald Rapids CPUs will see an announcement on December 14, and they're certainly being tested as hardware benchmark finder Benchleaks has found a couple of Geekbench 5 results. The leaked benchmarks for the Xeon Platinum 8551C and Xeon Platinum 8558P show remarkable gains in multi-core performance for a refresh of Sapphire Rapids with higher clock speeds.
Both CPUs are 48-core models, and although the Xeon Platinum 8551C has a higher base frequency at 2.9 GHz than the Xeon Platinum 8558P's 2.7 GHz, in Geekbench 5, they essentially performed the same. Both chips scored roughly 1,360 in the single-core test and 48,300 in the multi-core. It's impossible to verify the integrity of these results, but there's nothing particularly unusual about them.
It's a bit difficult to compare these benchmarks to 4th Gen Sapphire Rapids Xeons as most people with multi-thousand dollars tend not to test using Geekbench 5, but we were able to find some for the 48-core Xeon Platinum 8468. One of these scores (seemingly tested by ServeTheHome) comes from a Linux server wielding two Xeon Platinum 8468s and another from a Windows server with just one Xeon Platinum 8468. The leaked benchmarks used a single 48-core Emerald Rapids chip in a Linux server, so there's no perfect comparison here, but it's close enough.
Assuming the data is accurate in every benchmark, leaked or otherwise, it's fair to say that Emerald Rapids doesn't improve single-core performance much. But it's a different story in multi-core performance, as the leaked Xeon Platinum 8558P beats the single-CPU Xeon Platinum 8468 Windows server by nearly 40% and is very close behind the dual-CPU Xeon Platinum 8468 Linux server with almost 80% of the performance despite having just half the cores.
These numbers won't make Emerald Rapids an AMD EPYC Genoa killer (or even tied with Genoa if we're being realistic), but it is certainly impressive, given it's just a refresh. Data centers that already have Sapphire Rapids or were preparing to upgrade to Sapphire Rapids can easily swap out Emerald Rapids since it uses the same platform.
5th Gen Emerald Rapids Xeons will launch on December 14, which is very close to the much higher-end Granite Rapids launch date, due in 2024. Fabbed on the much higher-end Intel 3 process, Granite Rapids could be the CPU that gets Intel back to competition with AMD's EPYC lineup. Emerald Rapids will have to do for now, though, and with its impressive AI performance, it might be just enough.
