Network Performance Considerations for Intel® Xeon® 6900-Series Processors in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

Initial performance benchmarking in VCF 9.1 environments indicates throughput and efficiency variations on Granite Rapids-AP, including a decrease in packet processing (PPS) and an increase in CPU overhead in high-density synthetic IO tests vs previous generation Intel Xeon processors. ∙ Performance differences were most evident under high-intensity benchmarks and are expected to be minimal under standard workloads.

Environment

VMware Cloud Foundation version: 9.1 ∙ CPU Model: Intel® Xeon® 6900-Series Processors with P-Cores (Granite Rapids-AP)

Cause

The Intel® Xeon® 6900‑Series Processors employ a scalable, multi‑die architecture to enable higher core counts. Compared to previous generations, some workloads may observe increased inter‑die and cross‑socket cache access latencies. Within VCF networking environments, this behavior can affect data and interrupt delivery paths between PCIe devices and processor cores, potentially reducing packet processing efficiency and increasing CPU utilization in latency‑sensitive scenarios.

Resolution

Broadcom and Intel are jointly evaluating potential software optimizations to mitigate these networking performance artifacts.

Recommendation: Customers can benchmark the specific workloads that are candidates for the Intel® Xeon® 6900-Series (Granite Rapids-AP) processors prior to production deployment to ensure acceptable performance with VCF.