The Intel Xeon E5 v4 Review: Testing Broadwell-EP With Demanding Server Workloads
by Johan De Gelas on March 31, 2016 12:30 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Xeon
- Enterprise
- Enterprise CPUs
- Broadwell
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.
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jhh - Thursday, March 31, 2016 - link
The article says TSX-NI is supported on the E5, but if one looks at Intel ARK, it say it's not. Do the processors say they support TSX-NI? Or is this another one of the things which will be left for the E7?JohanAnandtech - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Intel's official slides say: "supports TSX". All SKUs, no exceptions.Oxford Guy - Thursday, March 31, 2016 - link
Bigger, badder, still obsolete cores.patrickjp93 - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Obsolete? Troll.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, April 5, 2016 - link
Unlike you, propagandist, I know what Skylake is.benzosaurus - Thursday, March 31, 2016 - link
"You can replace a dual Xeon 5680 with one Xeon E5-2699 v4 and almost double your performance while halving the CPU power consumption."I mean you can, but you can buy 4 X5680s for a quarter the price of a single E5-2699v4. It takes a lot of power savings to make that worthwhile. The pricing in the server market's always seemed weirdly non-linear to me.
warreo - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Presumably, it's not just about TCO. Space is at a premium in a datacenter, and so being able to fit more performance per sq ft also warrants a higher price, just like how notebook parts have historically been more expensive than their desktop equivalents.ShieTar - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
But you don't get 4 1366-Systems for the price of one 2011-3 System. Depending on your Memory, Storage and Interconnect Needs, even two full Systems based on the Xeon 5680 may cost you more than one system based on the E5-2699 v4. One less Infiniband-Adapter can easily save you 500$ in Hardware.And you are not only halving the CPU power consumption, but also the power consumption of the rest of the system that you no longer use, so instead of 140W you are saving probably at least 200W per System, which can already add up to more than 1k$ in electricity and cooling bills for a 24/7 machine running for 3 years.
And last, but by no means least, less parts means less space, less chance for failure, less maintenance effort. If you happily waste a few hours here or there to maintain your own workstation, you don't do the math, but if you have to pay somebody to do it, salaries matter quickly. With an MTBF for an entire server rarely being much higher than 40.000, and recovery/repair easily taking you a person-day of work, each system generates about 1.7 hours of work per year. Cost of work (it's more than salaries, of course) probably comes up to 100$ for a skilled technical administrator, thus producing another 500$ over 3 years of added operational cost.
And of course, space matters as well. If your data center is filled, it can be more cost effective to replace the old CPUs with new expensive ones, rather than build a new facility to fill with more old Systems.
If you add it all up, I doubt you can get a System with an Xeon 5680 and operate it over 3 years for anything below 20.000$. So going from two 20.000$-Systems to a single 24.000$ Dollar System (because of an extra 4000$ for the big CPU) should save you a lot of money in the long run.
JohanAnandtech - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Where do you get your pricing info from? I can not imagine that server vendors still sell X5680s.extide - Friday, April 1, 2016 - link
Yeah, if you go used. No enterprise sysadmin worth his salt is ever going to put used gear that is not in warranty, and in support into production.