The Intel Xeon Gold 6230 was a chip that saw a major re-position in the “Cascade Lake” second generation Intel Xeon Scalable lineup. When we reviewed the Intel Xeon Gold 6130, we really liked the mix of clock speed and cores. As a 16-core part, it hit the Microsoft Windows Server licensing model well. In the newest generation, Intel gave this SKU four additional cores, bumping the count up to 20. With this reposition, it is no longer competing head-to-head with the AMD EPYC 7371. Instead, it redefines value in this segment.



Key stats for the Intel Xeon Gold 6230: 20 cores / 40 threads and 2.1GHz base clock and 3.9GHz turbo boost with 27.5MB cache. The CPU features a 125W TDP. These are $1894 list price parts. Here is the ARK page with the feature set.

Here is what the lscpu output looks like for the chips:

Here, we see the same base clock speed as the previous generation. The turbo frequency increases by 200MHz to 3.9GHz up from 3.7GHz. Of course, the big upgrade comes from the four additional cores. Effectively, this is a part that will see 25% improvement over the previous generation in a lot of workloads at the same 125W TDP.

Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6230 Test Configuration

For our 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable CPU dual-socket reviews, we are using the following configuration:

System : Inspur Systems NF5280M5

: Inspur Systems NF5280M5 CPU : Intel Xeon Gold 6230

: Intel Xeon Gold 6230 RAM : 12x 32GB DDR4-2933 ECC RDIMMs

: 12x 32GB DDR4-2933 ECC RDIMMs Storage : 2x Intel DC S3520 480GB OS

: 2x Intel DC S3520 480GB OS PCIe Networking: Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx 25GbE, Intel X710 4x 10GbE SFP+

A quick note here, we did not utilize the Intel Optane DCPMM here because we had standard chips. Using Intel Optane DCPMM even with two 128GB modules per CPU to stay well below the 1TB per CPU memory limit would have meant our memory would work at only DDR4-2666 speeds.

The Inspur Systems NF5280M5 is a dual-socket Intel Xeon Scalable solution that has a variety of I/O configurations. We kept our test unit relatively light on rear riser cards to ensure we had significant airflow for the Intel Xeon Scalable line we would test up to 205W TDP.

We are going to add a link to our full Inspur Systems NF5280M5 review once that is online in the next few weeks.

Next, we are going to take a look at our Intel Xeon Gold 6230 benchmarks.