In 2020, we reported on the story of a Chinese vendor repackaging an Xeon CPU and surmised this would be a rabbit hole.
Late last week, Chinese IC design firm Montage Technology Ltd. formally announced its new Jintide processors: a 5th Gen lineup, with power drawn from Intel’s “Emerald Rapids” Xeon CPU. You may think this isn’t a case of Montage ripping off Intel. The two had had a partnership since as far back as 2016 when they started working with China’s Tsinghua University to meet the particular security needs of server and data center customers in China.
Previous Generation Benchmarks
Montage has released updated Jintide processors collectively with Intel’s Xeon releases. The latest batch comes in five models, from 16 to 48 cores. The main difference is that since the products fall within the limits of restrictions, they cannot hit the high core counts that Intel’s CPUs can. This sticks exceptionally close to the vocabulary of Intel’s products; in this case, Montage added a C to the front of models, so Xeon Platinum 8558P becomes Jintide C8558P.
It’s no new generation, but at least we can finally begin to gauge how well Montage’s CPUs perform. This is because of their Intel incentives, thanks to a slew of new benchmarks issued from PassMark Software. Starting with relative goes, the company benchmarked its 4th Gen Montage Jintide C5418Y, and its Intel counterpart was ‘Sapphire Rapids’ Xeon Gold 5418Y. As the bulk of the specs are the same – it assigns both the 2.0GHz clock speed, the turbo speed is up to 3.8GHz, and they both have 24 cores and 48 threads.
The Jintide processor scored 2341 by Intel’s 1961 on the single-thread rating, and the significant result saw the big Chinese processor hit 49045 by Intel’s 44487. You can check out the full results here. It’s going to be interesting to see how this latest generation of Jintide CPUs stacks up against their Intel ‘Emerald Rapids’ equivalents: a proud moment.