Phoronix has published benchmarks comparing the Intel Xeon 6780E Sierra Forest dual-socket server against the AMD EPYC 9965 Turin Dense flagship, using up-to-date Linux software. The tests highlight performance improvements for the Intel processor since its launch, driven by open-source optimizations. Both systems were evaluated on Ubuntu with the Linux 6.18 kernel for workloads that scale to high core counts.
The benchmarks, conducted by Phoronix, evaluate the Intel Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" in a dual-socket configuration against the AMD EPYC 9965, Intel's current top-end E-core server processor series. Recent software updates have boosted the Xeon 6780E's performance by approximately 14% compared to its launch, thanks to advancements in open-source and Linux ecosystems. This follows earlier tests involving the Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids and EPYC 9755 128-core setups with the latest upstream software.
The Intel Xeon 6780E features 144 cores per socket without simultaneous multithreading or Hyper-Threading, a base frequency of 2.2GHz, a maximum turbo of 3.0GHz, 108MB cache, and a 330W thermal design power. In contrast, the AMD EPYC 9965, based on Zen 5 dense cores, provides 192 cores and 384 threads, a 2.25GHz base clock, 3.7GHz maximum boost, 384MB L3 cache, support for AVX-512 instructions, and a 500W TDP.
Testing occurred on specific reference servers: the dual Intel setup used the Quanta Cloud QuantaGrid D55Q-2U with eight channels of DDR5-6400 memory per socket, while the dual EPYC system ran on the AMD Volcano server with twelve channels of DDR5-6400 per socket. Both employed Ubuntu 25.10, upgraded to the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel, GCC 15.2, and storage from a KIOXIA KCD8XPUG1T92 NVMe SSD. The workloads were selected for their ability to scale effectively to elevated core counts, with CPU power consumption tracked throughout.
Intel's Xeon 6900E series has seen limited deployments, and no Clearwater Forest hardware is available yet, keeping the Xeon 6700E as the leading E-core option. These results offer a current snapshot of how the processors perform under modern Linux conditions.