Intel Xeon E5 Version 3: Up to 18 Haswell EP Cores
by Johan De Gelas on September 8, 2014 12:30 PM ESTEnergy and HPC
AVX/FP intensive applications are known to be real power hogs. How bad can it get? We used the OpenFOAM test and measured both average and maximum power (the 95th percentile). Average power tells us how much energy will be consumed for each HPC job while maximum power is important as you have to allocate enough amps to your rack to feed your HPC server/cluster.
This confirms there is more going on than just the fact that our "Wildcat Pass" server consumes more than the Supermicro server in this test. At peak, the Xeon E5-2699 v3 consumes almost 450W (!!) more than at idle. Even if we assume that the fans take 100W, that means that 350W is going to the CPUs. That's around 175W per socket, and even though it's measured at the wall and thus includes the Voltager regulators, that's a lot of power. The Xeon E5-2699 v3 is a massive powerhouse, but it's one that needs a lot of amps to perform its job.
Interestingly, the Xeon E5-2695 v3 is also using more power than all previous Xeons. The contrast with our Drupal power measurements is very telling. In the Drupal test, the CPU was able to let many of the cores sleep a lot of the time. In OpenFOAM, all the cores are working at full bore and the superior power savings of the Haswell cores deep sleep states do not matter much. But which CPU is the winner? To make this more clear, we have to calculate the actual energy consumed (average power x time ran).
When we look at how much energy is consumed to get the job done, the picture changes. The old Xeon "Sandy Bridge EP" is far behind. It is clear that Intel has improved AVX efficiency quite a bit. The low power Xeon E5-2650L v3 is a clear winner. In second place, the fastest Xeon on the planet actually saves energy compared to the older Xeons, as long as you can provide the peak amps.
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martinpw - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
There is a nice tool called i7z (can google it). You need to run it as root to get the live CPU clock display.kepstin - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
Most Linux distributions provide a tool called "turbostat" which prints statistical summaries of real clock speeds and c state usage on Intel cpus.kepstin - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
Note that if turbostat is missing or too old (doesn't support your cpu), you can build it yourself pretty quick - grab the latest linux kernel source, cd to tools/power/x86/turbostat, and type 'make'. It'll build the tool in the current directory.julianb - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
Finally the e5-xxx v3s have arrived. I too can't wait for the Cinebench and 3DS Max benchmark results.Any idea if now that they are out the e5-xxxx v2s will drop down in price?
Or Intel doesn't do that...
MrSpadge - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Correct, Intel does not really lower prices of older CPUs. They just gradually phase out.tromp - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
As an additional test of the latency of the DRAM subsystem, could you please run the "make speedup" scaling benchmark of my Cuckoo Cycle proof-of-work system at https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo ?That will show if 72 threads (2 cpus with 18 hyperthreaded cores) suffice to saturate the DRAM subsystem with random accesses.
-John
Hulk - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
I know this is not the workload these parts are designed for, but just for kicks I'd love to see some media encoding/video editing apps tested. Just to see what this thing can do with a well coded mainstream application. Or to see where the apps fades out core-wise.Assimilator87 - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
Someone benchmark F@H bigadv on these, stat!iwod - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
I am looking forward to 16 Core Native Die, 14nm Broadwell Next year, and DDR4 is matured with much better pricing.Brutalizer - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Yawn, the new upcoming SPARC M7 cpu has 32 cores. SPARC has had 16 cores for ages. Since some generations back, the SPARC cores are able to dedicate all resources to one thread if need be. This way the SPARC core can have one very strong thread, or massive throughput (many threads). The SPARC M7 cpu is 10 billion transistors:http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/08/13/oracle-cr...
and it will be 3-4x faster than the current SPARC M6 (12 cores, 96 threads) which holds several world records today. The largest SPARC M7 server will have 32-sockets, 1024 cores, 64TB RAM and 8.192 threads. One SPARC M7 cpu will be as fast as an entire Sunfire 25K. :)
The largest Xeon E5 server will top out at 4-sockets probably. I think the Xeon E7 cpus top out at 8-socket servers. So, if you need massive RAM (more than 10TB) and massive performance, you need to venture into Unix server territory, such as SPARC or POWER. Only they have 32-socket servers capable of reaching the highest performance.
Of course, the SGI Altix/UV2000 servers have 10.000s of cores and 100TBs of RAM, but they are clusters, like a tiny supercomputer. Only doing HPC number crunching workloads. You will never find these large Linux clusters run SAP Enterprise workloads, there are no such SAP benchmarks, because clusters suck at non HPC workloads.
-Clusters are typically serving one user who picks which workload to run for the next days. All SGI benchmarks are HPC, not a single Enterprise benchmark exist for instance SAP or other Enterprise systems. They serve one user.
-Large SMP servers with as many as 32 sockets (or even 64-sockets!!!) are typically serving thousands of users, running Enterprise business workloads, such as SAP. They serve thousands of users.