Intel AMX Performance With The Xeon 678X Workstation CPU

One of the most compelling features for Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids alongside MRDIMMs is Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for helping accelerate AI workloads and more. AMX is also found with the new Granite Rapids WS processors and in currently having my hands on an Intel Xeon 678X in the HP Z4 G6i workstation, I ran some benchmarks looking at the AMX performance and power impact for this high-end workstation. Similar to past AMX benchmarks on Phoronix of Xeon server processors with Advanced Matrix Extensions, this round of testing is looking at the AMX benefits with the Xeon 678X workstation processor with compatible software on Linux. For AI workloads especially but also other select software like Open Image Denoise adapted for AMX-BF16 can mean some very significant performance gains. Unlike early generations of Xeon server/workstation CPUs with AVX-512, AMX also doesn't come with any big power/thermal impacts as also confirmed in this latest round of tests. This round of testing was done on the HP Z4 G6i workstation with Xeon 678X and 4 x 32GB DDR5-6400 memory and running Ubuntu 26.04 with the Linux 7.0 kernel. Thanks to HP for supplying this review sample for a few weeks of Linux testing at Phoronix and being our first hands-on with Granite Rapids WS.