In 2020, we reported how a Chinese vendor had repacked a Xeon CPU and speculated that this could be the first of many such products, which proved to be the case.
At the end of 2023, Chinese IC design company Montage Technology unveiled its new 5th Gen lineup of Jintide processors, which are based on Intel's ‘Emerald Rapids’ Xeon CPU.
It isn’t, you might be thinking, a case of Montage ripping off Intel. The two companies have had an agreement since 2016 when they began working with China's Tsinghua University to address the specific security needs of server and data center customers in China.
Previous gen benchmarked
Montage updates its Jintide processors in step with Intel’s Xeon releases and the latest batch comes in five models with core counts ranging from 16 to 48 cores. They can’t achieve the higher core counts Intel's CPUs can due to restrictions, but that’s the main difference. Even the naming remains much the same as Intel’s products, although Montage adds a C to the beginning, so Xeon Platinum 8558P becomes Jintide C8558P.
Although it’s not the latest generation, we can get an idea of how Montage’s CPUs fare against their Intel equivalents with some new benchmarks from PassMark Software. The company pitted the 4th Gen Montage Jintide C5418Y against its Intel counterpart, the ‘Sapphire Rapids’ Xeon Gold 5418Y.
While many of the details are the same – the clock speed of both is 2.0GHz, turbo speed is up to 3.8GHz and they both have 24 cores and 48 threads, there are evidently differences.
The Jintide processor achieved a single thread rating of 2341, compared to Intel’s 1961, and the big result, the CPU Mark, saw the Chinese processor hit 49045, 9.3% higher than Intel’s 44487. You can view the full results here.
It will be interesting to see how the latest generation of Jintide CPUS compares with their Intel ‘Emerald Rapids’ equivalents, and hopefully we won't have too long to find out.
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