First review of the Intel Xeon W-3500 comes with a shocking realization: Intel excels in scientific computing and ML, but lags desperately everywhere
Puget Systems has published a detailed assessment of content creation of the Intel Xeon W-3500 series. The company’s latest workstation processors are an update to the W-3400 series and offer an increased number of cores and cache, but retain the core architecture. These new chips aim to address Intel’s lagging performance in high-end desktop (HEDT) content creation 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, benchmarking used standardized settings, keeping RAM speed and cooling factors in check.
In Adobe After Effects, an application that takes advantage of multicore CPUs, Intel’s processors showed some performance improvements, although AMD’s Threadripper led the charge. Similarly, the Xeon processors showed only incremental gains in Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, with Threadripper still leading in single-threaded and multi-core performance.
Show some gains
In video editing and motion graphics, the Xeons performed respectably, but couldn’t 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 resolved previous issues where strange models with low core counts underperformed.
Adobe Photoshop testing confirmed that these high core count processors were not the best choice due to the application’s sensitivity to latency and its 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, especially in Blender with a 10-15% improvement. However, AMD’s higher core models were faster and completed tasks significantly faster.
In summary
At the end of its review, Puget Systems said: “The new Intel Xeon W-3500 processor family is a nice refresh of an existing product stack, but leaves a lot to be desired if Intel wants to compete with AMD in the HEDT Content Creation space. As usual, performance gains depend heavily on the specific application, but in general the gains are between 0 and 20%, with a preference for multi-threaded applications due to the higher number of cores.”
Puget noted that while it did not test the new chips for scientific computing and HPC/ML applications in this review (because the focus was on content creation), this is an area where the Intel Xeon W-3500 series will shine and whose plans are planned. a comparison for that in the future.
