Intel's 16-core Sapphire Rapids generation Xeon chip overclocks to 7.2GHz, but fails any performance tests

An overclocking competition was held at Computex 2023 in Taiwan. The Level1Techs team was able to overclock the cores of Intel's Sapphire Rapids generation chip to 7.2GHz.

Here's What We Know

The Intel Xeon server processor has 16 cores. Moreover, while consumer solutions use a combination of performance (P) and energy efficient (E) cores, in our case only P cores are used.

The chip overclock showed why Intel decided to add some E cores to processors for regular customers. This is due to a desire to limit the growth in power consumption. Enthusiasts managed to overclock all Intel Xeon cores to 7.2 GHz. In this mode of operation, each of them consumed 50W.

As a matter of fact, the total power consumption of 800W was the only thing they managed to find out during the experiment. The thing is that at 7.2 GHz, enthusiasts were unable to assess the CPU's performance because it didn't pass any performance tests.

But at 6.1 GHz Intel Xeon was able to complete the test in Cinebench R23. The result was approximately 46,000 points, which was not enough to make it into the top 10 among processors equipped with 16 cores.

Source: PCGamer