Intel Xeon E5 Version 3: Up to 18 Haswell EP Cores

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 readeable, 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 still holds a healty lead over its 14-core brother. The Haswell architecture's improved integer core plays a larger role here than in compression as the E5-2697 v2 with 50% cores and a maximum clock of 3GHz (all cores Turbo Boost) cannot overtake the 3.2GHz Xeon E5-2667 v3. It is worth noting that the latter cannot Turbo Boost with all cores active.

The advantage over the Sandy Bridge EP is significant: 50% higher performance while the clock speed is only slightly higher as the Xeon E5-2690 can run briefly at 3.3GHz. The new Haswell core is good news for those who regularly deal with large software builds.