The first Intel Xeon W-3500 review revealed a shocking truth: Intel excels in scientific computing and machine learning, but lags far behind in other areas

Puget Systems released a in-depth content creation review between Intel Xeon W-3500 series. The company’s latest workstation processors are an update to the W-3400 series, maintaining the core architecture while offering a higher core count and cache. These new chips aim to address Intel’s lagging performance compared to Intel in high-end desktop (HEDT) content creation. 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; This means real-world performance may vary slightly. For consistency, standard setups were used in the benchmarking and made sure to control RAM speed and cooling factors.

Inside Adobe In After Effects, an application that takes advantage of multi-core CPUs, Intel’s processors showed some performance improvements, but AMD’s Threadripper held the lead. Similarly, Xeon processors showed only incremental gains in Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve; Threadripper still leads in single-threaded and multi-core performance.

Showing some achievements

In video editing and motion graphics, the Xeons performed respectably but couldn’t beat AMD’s offerings. In particular, RAW codec performance was positive, with Premiere Pro showing minor improvements. DaVinci Resolve further emphasized AMD’s superiority; however, Intel had resolved previous issues with single-core count models underperforming.

Adobe Photoshop Testing confirmed that these high-core processors are not the best choice due to the application’s latency sensitivity and dependence on a single core. AMD’s Threadripper dominated here as well.

In Unreal Engine tests and CPU rendering tests (Cinebench, V-Ray, Blender) the Xeons showed some gains, with a 10-15% improvement especially in Blender. However, AMD’s high-core models were faster and completed tasks much faster.

(Image credit: Puget Systems)

summarize

At the end of its review, Puget Systems said: “The new Intel Content Creation. As is typical, performance gains are highly dependent on the specific application, but overall gains range from 0-20% with a bias towards multi-threaded applications due to increased core count.”

While Puget didn’t test new chips for scientific computing and HPC/ML applications in this review (as its focus is on content creation), he noted that this is an area where the Intel Xeon W-3500 series will shine, and he plans to move forward in this area. a comparison for this in the future.