In this paper we report on a set of benchmark results obtained by CERN openlab when comparing a 32-core, quad socket, “Sandy Bridge-EP” server with a 16-core, dual socket, “Sandy Bridge-EP” server and a 40-core, quad socket server using Intel’s previous microarchitecture, the “Westmere-EX”. The Intel marketing names for the corresponding processors are the “Xeon E5-4600 processor series”, “Xeon E5-2600 processor series” and “Xeon E7-4800 processor series”, respectively. All three processors are produced using a 32 nm process. Multiple benchmarks were used to get a good understanding of the performance of each processor. We used both industry-standard benchmarks, such as SPEC CPU2006, and specific High Energy Physics benchmarks, representing both simulation of physics detectors and data analysis of physics events.