Closing Thoughts

With the limited amount of time we had to spend with the new Broadwell-EP Xeons ahead of today's embargo, we spent most of our time on our new benchmarks. However we did a quick check on power as well. It looks like both idle power and load power when running a full floating point workload have decreased a little bit, but we need to do a more extensive check to further confirm and characterize this.

Meanwhile, considering what a wonderful offering the Xeon E5-2650L v3 was, it is a pitty that Intel did not include such a low power SKU among our samples for review.  The Xeon E5-2699 v4 is a solid product, but it's not a home run. Either this is just an hiccup of our current setup (firmware?), but it seems the new Xeon E3 v4s do not reach the same turbo speeds as our Xeon E5 v3s. As a result, single threaded performance is (sometimes) slightly slower, and the new processor needs more cores to beat the previous one.

We noticed this mostly in the HPC applications, where the new Xeon is a bit of mixed bag. Still, considering that 72 to 88 threads are a bit much for lots of interesting applications (Spark, SQL databases...) there is definitely room for processors that sacrifice high core counts for higher single threaded performance (without exagerating). We have been stuck at 3.6 GHz for way too long.

With that said, there is little doubt that the Xeon E5-2699 v4 delivers in the one application that matter the most: virtualization.

Although we have not yet extensively tested on top of an hypervisor, we are pretty sure that the extra cores and the lower VMexit latencies will make this CPU perform well in virtualized environments. Intel's resource director technology and many improvements (posted interrupts) that help the hypervisor to perform better in I/O intensive tasks are very attractive features.

Although it is not much, as compared to the Haswell-EP based Xeon E5 v3s, performance has also increased by about 20% in key applications such as databases and ERP applications. And while we can complain all we want about the slightly regression in single threaded performance in some cases, the fact of the matter is that Intel has increased performance by 2 to 2.7 times in four years in those key applications, all the while holding power consumption at more or less the same. In other words, it will pay off to upgrade those Sandy Bridge-EP servers. And for many enterprises, that is what matters. 

NAMD
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  • xrror - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link

    Even at 3.3Ghz though, they shouldn't be that slow. I'm taking a guess - if this was a student lab, and they bothered to specifically order xeon (or opteron back in the day) workstations - I'm guessing this was a CAD/CAM lab or something running a boatload of expensive licenced software (like, autodesk, solidworks, etc) and some of that stuff is horrible at thrashing on the hard drive, constantly.

    And I doubt your school could spring the cash for SSD drives in them (because Workstation SKU == you pay dearly OEM workstation 'certified' drive cost).

    This is all guesses though. And not trying to defend - it does suck when you have what should be a sweet machine choking for whatever reason, and you're there trying to get your assignments done and you just want to smash the screen cause it just chhhuuuuuuggggsss... ;p
  • SkipPerk - Friday, April 8, 2016 - link

    I have seen this many times, even in the for-profit sector. I once saw a compute cluster that was choking on server with slow storage. They had a 10 gb network and fast Xeon machines running on flash, but the primary storage was too slow. When they get a proper SAN it was an order of magnitude improvement.

    Back in the day storage was often the bottleneck, but it still comes up today.
  • someonesomewherelse - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link

    We ran everything in virtual machines with the actual disk images not stored locally.... and the lans in the classrooms were 100mbit, idk about the connection from the classroom to the server with the image. How's that for slow?

    I would have loved it if our stuff was as 'slow' as yours. The wifi in the classrooms was very fast too..... especially since I doubt anyone bothered with turning of their torrents (well I mean it's completely understandable, you are going to watch the new episode of your favorite show once you are back home and not everyone had (well has, but most people can get it now) fth with at least 100Mbit line (ideally symmetrical, but some isps are too gready with ul speeds so 300/50 is cheaper than 100/100...... and good luck getting 1000/1000 on a residential package (the hw isn't the problem since you can get 1000/1000 with a commercial (aka over priced) package..... using the same hw... basically I would just need to sign a new contract, send it back, and enjoy the faster line in 1 business day or less)...well at least there are no bw caps (if I didn't read foreign boards bw caps on non mobile connections would be something I'd think no isp could do and not lose all customers) and there's we have no dmca (or something similar) and afaik no plans for one either (if they tried to pass such a law I can imagine that you'd have enough support for a referendum which you would win with a huge mayority), even better, the methods used to catch people downloading torrents are illegal anyway so any evidence obtained with them or derived from them is inadmissible anyway and just by presenting it you have admitted to several crimes which the police and prosecution are obliged to investigate/prosecute.... copyright infringment however is a civil matter).
  • donwilde1 - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link

    One of the more interesting Intel features, in my opinion, is that Broadwell carries an on-board encryption engine with its own interpreter similar to a small-memory, embedded JVM. This enables full Trusted Boot capability, which I view as a necessity in today's hackable world. Would you consider a follow-on article on this? The project was a clean-room development called BeiHai, done in China.
  • JamesAnthony - Wednesday, April 6, 2016 - link

    From what I can tell in looking over the benchmarks, there is not much of an increase in performance at all in core vs core performance speeds going from the V1 CPUs to the V4 CPUs
    As if you look at the benchmarks, and calculate that you are comparing 16 cores to 44 cores, the 44 core setup is not 2.75x faster.

    So while your overall speed goes up, your work accomplished per core is not increasing at the same rate.

    Why does this matter? Well thanks to software licensing costs, as you add cores it gets very expensive quickly. So if your software costs (which can easily exceed the hardware costs very quickly) go up with each core you add, but the work done does not, you quickly wind up in a negative cost / performance ratio.

    For quite a few people the E5-2667 v2 CPU with 8 cores at 3.5 GHz (Turbo 4) comes out around the best value for the software licensing cost.

    So while Intel puts out processors that overall can do more work than the previous ones, the move to per core software licensing is making it a negative value proposition. This is why people keep wanting higher clock speed lower core count processors, but we seem stuck around 3.5 GHz for many years.
  • SkipPerk - Friday, April 8, 2016 - link

    Although you are right for workstations, so much demand is for generic virtualized machines. Many buyers are fine with 2 ghz with as many cores as they can get. They load as little RAM as the spec requires and throw out the cheapest single core, dual thread 2 GB RAM VM they can. This is how call centers work, not to mention many low-level office jobs. They do not care about performance because this is more than enough.

    I have had specialty applications where prosumer 6-core or 8-core CPUs were the better deal (usually liquid cooled and overclocked), but not many buyers are licensing insanely expensive analytical software by the core.
  • SeanJ76 - Sunday, April 10, 2016 - link

    @Xeon chips!! TOTAL GARBAGE!
  • legolasyiu - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link

    The ASUS Workstation/Server board with V4 boards are very stable and they have 10% OC. I am very interested how the processor with those boards.
  • Bulat Ziganshin - Saturday, May 7, 2016 - link

    >This increases AES (symmetric) encryption performance by 20-25%

    PCLMULQDQ implements part of Galois Field multiplication and bdw actually improved only GCM part of AES-GCM algo. neither AES nor other popular symmetric encryption algos became faster
  • oceanwave1000 - Monday, May 9, 2016 - link

    This article mentioned that the Broadwell EP e5-v4 family has 3 die configurations. I got the 306mm2 and 454mm2. Did anyone catch the third one?

    Thanks.

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