With recently having carried out benchmarks and finding the Intel Xeon 6780E “Sierra Forest” performance has improved ~14% since launch day thanks to open-source/Linux software improvements plus also recently having carried out Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids vs. EPYC 9755 128-core benchmarks using the latest upstream software, here is a look at how the Xeon 6780E “Sierra Forest” dual socket server is comparing up against the AMD EPYC 9965 Turin Dense flagship when both are running up-to-date software.
With the Intel Xeon 6900E series having not seen any widespread deployments (and in fact Intel ignoring it for the Clearwater Forest announcement) and not yet seeing any Clearwater Forest hardware, the Xeon 6700E series remains Intel’s top-end E-core server processors at the moment. The Xeon 6780E as a reminder provides 144 cores per socket without any SMT / Hyper Threading and a 2.2GHz base frequency with 3.0GHz maximum turbo frequency, 108MB cache, and 330 Watt TDP.
The AMD EPYC 9965 meanwhile as the top-end processor with Zen 5 dense cores offers 192 cores / 384 threads, 2.25GHz base clock with 3.7GHz maximum boost clock, 384MB L3 cache, AVX-512 support, and a 500 Watt TDP.
For this benchmarking the two Intel Xeon 6780E processors were running on the Quanta Cloud QuantaGrid D55Q-2U reference server maxed out with its eight channels per socket of DDR5-6400 memory. The EPYC 9965 2P was running on the AMD Volcano reference server with its twelve channels per socket of DDR5-6400 memory. Both servers were using Ubuntu 25.10 with manually upgrading to the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel and GCC 15.2 and other Ubuntu 25.10 defaults and running from KIOXIA KCD8XPUG1T92 NVMe SSD storage.
This up-to-date software stacking with the Intel Xeon 6780E 2P and AMD EPYC 9965 2P were aligned with the prior Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids vs. EPYC 9755 128-core benchmarks while limiting the workloads tested to those that were more applicable to scaling better to the higher core counts.
The CPU power consumption also continued to be monitored on a per-test basis. Let’s proceed with this fresh look at Intel Xeon Sierra Forest against AMD EPYC Turin on Ubuntu with the modern Linux 6.18 LTS kernel.
