The Intel Xeon E5 v4 Review: Testing Broadwell-EP With Demanding Server Workloads

Application Development: Linux Kernel Compile

A more real world benchmark to test the integer processing power of our Xeon servers is a Linux kernel compile. Although few people compile their own kernel, compiling other software on servers is a common task and this will give us a good idea of how the CPUs handle a complex build.

To do this we have downloaded the 3.11 kernel from kernel.org. We then compiled the kernel with the "time make -jx" command, where x is the maximum number of threads that the platform is capable of using. To make the graph more readable, the number of seconds in wall time was converted into the number of builds per hour.

A kernel compile does not scale perfectly with more cores, but the Xeon E5-2699 v4 offers up to 2.7 times better performance than the Xeon it is supposed to replace. This kind of workload really seems to favor the new Broadwell core: even at slightly lower clockspeeds, the 18 core Xeon E5-2695 v4 beats the v3 version with the same number of cores by 9%.