Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 and E5-2650 v3 Review: Haswell-EP with 10 Cores
by Ian Cutress on October 13, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- IT Computing
- Intel
- Xeon
- Enterprise
- Enterprise CPUs
Intel Xeon E5-26xx v3 10 Cores Conclusion
Intel’s product stack for 2P capable CPUs is somewhat frustrating. The lower cost models always offer the best value for money, but getting a more expensive and faster CPU means that you end up with a faster unit. So if a user is buying purely on bang-for-buck, they might end up with a quad core.
The essence of the workstation is always centered on compute-limited throughput. I have mentioned this in a previous review – almost all computer usage can be split into idea-limited throughput or compute-limited. For the former, the user needs a faster brain, but for the latter a super-fast CPU is needed. Being able to get through a compute task even faster means the user is able to complete contracts quicker enabling more work and more money. Ultimately this means that if it can be justified in getting a higher core count processor, even at the expense of 100-200 MHz per thread, it might be worth investing in another $500.
In my previous existence requiring workstation CPUs, I was naïve and assumed that a 2P rig was the way to go – I even convinced my boss to invest in three for our simulation team. Our basic C++ simulations used threads, but no-one in the team understood about thread and cache management, let alone NUMA programming, because we were more chemists than computer scientists. I always encourage users to test their software on 1P and 2P workstations before convincing the people with the money to buy a machine – depending on the software, a big 1P system might have fewer cores but the cache management might increase throughput even more.
With this in mind, the Xeon E5 v3 workstation focused CPUs like the W range now sit in a more generalized form. Other CPUs, with more cores for 25% more in cost on paper might offer a 40% potential increase in throughput for less power. The E5-2687W v3 is a similar price to its last generation brethren, but the landscape around it has changed in favor of other processors – 160W is still a lot to take in, especially when 145W processors seem to offer more. As a 10-core processor, the E5-2687W v3 still represents the best 10-core you can buy. But we have preliminary numbers in house for 12 core and 14 core CPUs, showing that a small increase in cost results in a better-than-cost increase in performance with lower power consumption.
The Xeon E5-2650 v3 represents part of the E5-2687W v3 problem. For just over half the price ($2057 vs. $1166), this CPU has two thirds of the TDP while only losing 500-600 MHz frequency across the power range. When paired up in a 2P system, two E5-2650 v3 CPUs against one E5-2687W v3 CPU will offer almost double the threads for only 13% extra CPU cost. For users that have software to take advantage of this, it makes a lot more sense while offering double the DRAM capabilities.
Over the coming weeks we hope to also supply reviews of 12 core and 14 core Xeon E5 v3 CPUs. Stay tuned for those! All our results will also be included in our CPU comparison section, Bench.
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JarredWalton - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link
For ten cores I wouldn't expect a huge bump over the "minimum guaranteed" speed. It's one thing to boost a few cores by a large amount, but the whole problem with multi-core designs is that if you load up all the cores then either you have massive power consumption or you need to curtail the clocks. Honestly, running ten cores at 100% and still hitting 3.1GHz is impressive in my book -- and it still consumes up to 160W.Carl Bicknell - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link
I got my numbers a bit wrong: the 2687W is 3.1 GHz default and 3.2 GHz all cores on turbo, according to wikipedia.That's disappointing.
Apart from anything else, they've managed to get their best 12 (yes twelve!) core CPU (E5-2690 v3) to operate at 3.1 GHz turbo all cores in a 135 W design.
With two fewer cores and an extra 25 watts I'd hope for more than a mere 100 MHz performance.
NovoRei - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link
Ian, could you comment on performance with pure AVX2 and mixed AVX instructions and where the W version stands?Thanks.
Laststop311 - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link
4100 for an 18 core ill take 2ruthan - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
I would like to see, benchmarks some of those low power - 6/12 or 12/24 - 55W a 65W models.pokazene_maslo - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
Is it possible to override turbo boost to force all cores to run at maximum turbo freqency? (E5-2687W-v3 running all cores at 3.5GHz)alpha754293 - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
Well, the thing with these "big" multicore systems is no different than testing large SMP system. You have to use programs for applications that where it make sense to use it. For engineering analyses and simulations, even HOW a problem is divided up (from a single, much larger problem) can have an impact on not only the speed for the analysis/simulation, but also the accuracy of the simulation, and you have to have a pretty sound understanding of the math and physics involved in order to make the best determination.And for some applications, there is such a thing and you CAN have TOO many cores (where you've divided up a problem so much that it's now so small that it can't fully load a core up anymore, and that the process of dividing and re-assembling the results takes an extremely large amount of time.) (You can run into that with some of the FEA analysis).
I was working with Johan and studying a while slew of parameters using LS-DYNA to study how the various ways of decomposing a problem can have an impact on the crash test simulation results, and how swap performance means EVERYTHING when it comes to mechanical engineering simluations.
mapesdhs - Thursday, October 16, 2014 - link
Oddly enough this can be the case with animation rendering aswell. I know a movie studio
which uses a system that can exclude cores from a render pipeline so there is more RAM
and cache bandwidth available with a fewer number of cores. This can matter because
sometimes complex film renders can use huge amounts of data. Someone at SPI told me
one frame of a big movie can involve 500GB of data.
Interesting how the same issue can crop up in such widely different fields.
Ian.
RAMdiskSeeker - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
Could you please test these motherboards for supporting ECC unbuffered DIMMs, reporting that ECC is active, and overclocking potential with ECC DIMMs? It would be good to know whether Xeon chips on non-server motherboards can use ECC.nutral - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
What still is strange to me is that there is still no workstation cpu focused on a workstation with single threaded software. Wouldn't an i7 cpu still be much faster than this workstation cpu?