Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several months. Since then I have ratcheted up the benchmarks with nearly 500 benchmarks between the AMD EPYC 9755 and Intel Xeon 6980P processors for an even more comprehensive look at these CPUs atop Linux 6.18 LTS.
My extra time over the holidays was spent working on some new/updated benchmarks with updating to some newer versions of tests, making sure the benchmarks are running nicely in looking toward Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, and also increasing the intensity of some of the benchmarks in forward-looking with the next-generation Intel Clearwater Forest / Diamond Rapids and AMD EPYC Venice server processors out on the horizon. So following that, I ran a fresh showdown between these 128-core Xeon 6980P and EPYC 9755 dual socket server processors in what ended up being just under 500 benchmarks for a very well-rounded look at these current generation wares.
Ubuntu 25.10 was running on the KIOXIA KCD8XPUG1T92 PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD with the Linux 6.18.1 LTS kernel and GCC 15.2 compiler. The Xeon 6980P 2P was loaded out with 24 x 64GB DDR5-8800 MRDIMMs while the EPYC 9755 2P enjoyed its load-out of DDR5.
From there it was down to a benchmark battle in looking at the EPYC 9755 vs. Xeon 6980P performance across hundreds of benchmarks while also monitoring the combined dual socket power consumption too for factoring in the power efficiency. Due to the EPYC Turin CPUs being tested on a reference platform while Granite Rapids was running on the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1, due to those platform differences and both vendors not recommending total power consumption from reference servers, just the CPU power consumption was being monitored for the comparison.
