Intel 5th Gen Xeon Performance Benchmarks: Impressive Efficiency Gains With "Optimized Power Mode"

With using FFmpeg for some live video handling, there was around a 10% performance hit running in the Optimized Power Mode. But there was a 95 Watt power saving! The peak CPU power consumption was nearly 100 Watts lower. This led to a 31% boost in power efficiency for FFmpeg workloads on the Xeon Platinum Emerald Rapids server.

With an FFmpeg video-on-demand setup there was a slight hit to the raw performance but running at 69% the original 2P CPU power consumption and in turn driving up the performance-per-Watt by nearly 40%.

For a very scalable workload like Xmrig for Monero mining that keeps all of the CPU cores very busy, the raw performance was virtually unchanged but even hear with all the resource utilization the Xeon Platinum 8592+ 2P delivered so at 96% the out-of-the-box power consumption. The minimum CPU power consumption was also lower and the time spent in the lower power states.

Decompressing a Zstandard compressed file alone isn't enough to keep a 256-thread server busy... In exchange for a slight hit to the decompression speed with Optimized Power Mode, there was 100 Watt lower power consumption and the overall performance-per-Watt increasing by 40%.