Benchmarking the Evolution of Performance and Energy Efficiency Across Recent Generations of Intel Xeon Processors

In the span of 1.5 years, Intel has launched four families of Xeon Processors, with some novel architectural features; first the Sapphire Rapids generation which featured a version with on-package HBM, the Emerald Rapids generation, and then differentiated by releasing the performance-oriented Granite Rapids and the efficiency-oriented Sierra Forest families. In this work, we evaluate the performance and efficiency of CPUs from each of these generations and variants, with a particular focus on bandwidth-bound high performance computing (HPC) applications. We contrast runtime and energy consumption figures and track trends across generations.