The Intel Binary Optimization Tool (BOT) has been launched alongside the "Arrow Lake Refresh" series of processors, which includes the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus models. While the tool is beneficial for gamers looking to extract a few extra frames from their setups, it may be a nightmare for makers of benchmarking tools like Geekbench by Primate Labs. Recently, Primate Labs testing found that BOT changes the way .exe applications run and concluded that Geekbench runs will now flag these BOT-enhanced runs. However, in deeper testing, Primate Labs discovered that Intel's BOT may deliver significant boosts in some applications like Object Remover and HDR, increasing performance by up to 30%. This is thanks to the deep vectorization that the BOT performs behind the scenes to optimize performance.

For example, Primate Labs used Intel's own Software Development Emulator (SDE) to measure how many instructions were executed and which types of instructions the program executed. Without BOT, Geekbench 6 required a total of 1.26 trillion instructions to finish, while a BOT-enhanced run completed with 1.08 trillion instructions. This is an impressive 14% reduction. However, when examining the execution by type, we see that BOT makes heavy use of vector instructions like SSE2 and AVX2. The number of scalar instructions needed to execute a program fell from 220 billion to 84.6 billion, while the number of vector instructions increased from 1.25 billion to 18.3 billion, a 13.7x increase. This means that Intel BOT finds a way to turn inefficient scalar code into vectorized instructions that are processed much more efficiently inside Intel CPUs. These techniques indicate a very complex behind-the-scenes process than was originally believed. The Geekbench v6.7 update will include a flag for BOT, allowing future Geekbench results to be easily distinguished as BOT-enhanced or not.

In early February, Intel finally updated its HEDT sector with the latest "Granite Rapids-WS" Xeon 600 Series processors for workstations. The company has now published a detailed table of turbo frequencies that provides specifics on each core's boost frequency in workloads like SSE, AVX2, AVX-512, and AMX, showing how much these workloads allow the CPU cores to boost. This means that during a continuous workload like AMX, these CPUs can only run at a sustained frequency defined in the tables below. At the very top of the new "Granite Rapids-WS" stack is the Xeon 698X, featuring 86 cores and 172 threads, backed by 336 MB of L3 cache. The chip runs at a 2.0 GHz base clock, boosting up to 4.8 GHz with Turbo Boost Max 3.0, or 4.6 GHz under Turbo Boost 2.0. This CPU is fully unlocked, allowing overclocking, which is still relatively rare in the Xeon workstation space.

In non-AVX workloads, this CPU can boost up to 4.8 GHz, while its lowest-performing core, numbered 86, sits at 3.0 GHz. However, AVX2 turbo frequencies cause a significant frequency downgrade, as the base frequency drops to 1.7 GHz, and the slowest core drops to 2.9 GHz when boosting across its 86-core design. Following this are the AVX-512 turbo frequencies, which see this flagship SKU running at a base clock speed of only 1.3 GHz and only 2.5 GHz across its 86 cores. Perhaps the most demanding turbo frequency testing occurs when AMX is enabled, resulting in a base frequency of only 1.1 GHz and only 2.0 GHz across all cores at once. This significant reduction comes from the demanding scenarios of these vector and matrix instruction processing, which are very heavy on the CPU.More information about other SKUs and details in AVX2, AVX-512, and AMX turbo frequencies follow.