Puget Systems has published a detailed content creation review of the Intel Xeon W-3500 series. The company's latest workstation processors are an update to the W-3400 series, offering a higher number of cores and cache, but maintaining the core architecture. These new chips aim to address Intel's lagging performance in the high-end desktop content creation (HEDT) space compared to AMD's Threadripper series.
Puget Systems had a full retail sample of the high-end Xeon w9-3595X, but used pre-production samples for other models, meaning real-world performance may vary slightly. For consistency, the benchmark used standardized configurations, ensuring that RAM speed and cooling factors were controlled.
In Adobe After Effects, an application that benefits from multi-core CPUs, Intel's processors showed some performance improvements, although AMD's Threadripper maintained the lead. Similarly, the Xeon processors only showed incremental gains in Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, with Threadripper still leading in single-threaded and multi-core performance.
Showing some profits
For video editing and motion graphics, the Xeons performed respectably but failed to surpass AMD's offerings. Specifically, Premiere Pro showed minor improvements, while RAW codec performance was positive. DaVinci Resolve further highlighted AMD's dominance, although Intel has resolved previous issues with low-performing odd core count models.
Adobe Photoshop testing confirmed that these high-core-count processors were not the best choice due to sensitivity to application latency and reliance on a single core. AMD's Threadripper also dominated here.
In Unreal Engine tests and CPU rendering benchmarks (Cinebench, V-Ray, Blender), the Xeons showed some gains, particularly in Blender with a 10-15% improvement. However, AMD's higher-core models were faster and completed tasks noticeably faster.
summing up
At the end of its review, Puget Systems said: “The new Intel contents. As is typical, the performance gain is highly dependent on the particular application, but in general the gains are 0-20% with a bias towards multi-threaded applications due to the higher number of cores.”
Puget noted that while it didn't test the new chips for scientific computing and HPC/ML applications in this review (as the focus was on content creation), this is an area where the Intel Xeon W-3500 series will shine and plans to execute it. a comparison for that in the future.