The Xeon E5-2600: Dual Sandy Bridge for Servers
by Johan De Gelas on March 6, 2012 9:27 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Virtualization
- Xeon
- Opteron
- Cloud Computing
Rendering Performance: Cinebench
Cinebench, based on MAXON's CINEMA 4D software, is probably one of the most popular benchmarks around as it is pretty easy to perform this benchmark on your own home machine. The benchmark supports 64 threads, more than enough for our 24- and 32-thread test servers. First we tested single-threaded performance, to evaluate the performance of each core.
Cinebench achieves an IPC between 1.4 and 1.8 and is mostly dominated by SSE2 code. The Sandy Bridge core offers about 33% better single-threaded SSE performance. We checked: the 33% can be split up into 21% gains from architectural improvements and 12% from the improved Turbo capabilities.
Let's check out the multi-threaded score.
Prior to the launch of the Xeon E5 series, the Opteron 6276 offered a better performance per dollar ratio than comparable Xeon 5600s due to their similar performance at a much lower pricepoint. Now that the Xeon E5 has arrived, the tables have turned. If Xeon E5 servers are in the same price range as Xeon 5600 servers, the Xeon E5-2630 will offer the best performance/price ratio.
And if you want top performance, Intel is the only option. Case in point: a dual Xeon E5-2690 comes close to what a Quad Opteron 6276 can deliver, with the dual Xeon scoring 24.7 while the quad Opteron scores 26.4.
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alpha754293 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Thanks for running those.Are those results with HTT or without?
If you can write a little more about the run settings that you used (with/without HTT, number of processes), that would be great.
Very interesting results thought.
It would have been interesting to see what the power consumption and total energy consumption numbers would be for these runs (to see if having the faster processor would really be that beneficial).
Thanks!
alpha754293 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
I should work with you more to get you running some Fluent benchmarks as well.But, yes, HPC simulations DO take a VERY long time. And we beat the crap out of our systems on a regular basis.
jhh - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
This is the most interesting part to me, as someone interested in high network I/O. With the packets going directly into cache, as long as they get processed before they get pushed out by subsequent packets, the packet processing code doesn't have to stall waiting for the packet to be pulled from RAM into cache. Potentially, the packet never needs to be written to RAM at all, avoiding using that memory capacity. In the other direction, web servers and the like can produce their output without ever putting the results into RAM.meloz - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
I wonder if this Data Direct I/O Technology has any relevance to audio engineering? I know that latency is a big deal for those guys. In past I have read some discussion on latency at gearslutz, but the exact science is beyond me.Perhaps future versions of protools and other professional DAWs will make use of Data Direct I/O Technology.
Samus - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
wow. 20MB of on-die cache. thats ridiculous.PwnBroker2 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
dont know about the others but not ATT. still using AMD even on the new workstation upgrades but then again IBM does our IT support, so who knows for the future.the new xeon's processors are beasts anyways, just wondering what the server price point will be.
tipoo - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
"AMD's engineers probably the dumbest engineers in the world because any data in AMD processor is not processed but only transferred to the chipset."...What?
tipoo - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Think you've repeated that enough for one article?tipoo - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Like the Ivy bridge comments, just for future readers note that this was a reply to a deleted troll and no longer applies.IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Johan, you got the percentage numbers for LS-Dyna wrong.You said for the first one: the Xeon E5-2660 offers 20% better performance, the 2690 is 31% faster. It is interesting to note that LS-Dyna does not scale well with clockspeed: the 32% higher clockspeed of the Xeon E5-2690 results in only a 14% speed increase.
E5-2690 vs Opteron 6276: +46%(621/426)
E5-2660 vs Opteron 6276: +26%(621/492)
E5-2690 vs E5-2660: +15%(492/426)
In the conclusion you said the E5 2660 is "56% faster than X5650, 21% faster than 6276, and 6C is 8% faster than 6276"
Actually...
LS Dyna Neon-
E5-2660 vs X5650: +77%(872/492)
E5-2660 vs 6276: +26%(621/492)
E5-2660 6C vs 6276: +9%(621/570)
LS Dyna TVC-
E5-2660 vs X5650: +78%(10833/6072)
E5-2660 vs 6276: +35%(8181/6072)
E5-2660 6C vs 6276: +13%(8181/7228)
It's funny how you got the % numbers for your conclusions. It's merely the ratio of lower number vs higher number multiplied by 100.