The Intel Xeon D Review: Performance Per Watt Server SoC Champion?
by Johan De Gelas on June 23, 2015 8:35 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Xeon-D
- Broadwell-DE
Conclusion: the Xeon D-1540 is awesome
If you only look at the integer performance of a single Broadwell core, the improvement over the Haswell based core is close to boring. But the fact that Intel was able to combine 8 of them together with dual 10 Gbit, 4 USB 3.0 controllers, 6 SATA 3 controller and quite a bit more inside a SoC that needs less than 45 W makes it an amazing product. In fact we have not seen such massive improvements from one Intel generation to another since the launch of the Xeon 5500. The performance per watt of a Xeon D-1540 is 50% better than the Haswell based E3 (Xeon E3-1230L).
Most of the design wins of the Xeon D are network and storage devices and, to a lesser degree, micro servers. Intel also positions the Xeon D machines at the Datacenter/Network edge, even as an IOT gateway.
Now, granted, market positioning slides are all about short powerful messages and leave little room for nuance. But since we have room for lengthier commentaries, our job is to talk about nuances. So we feel the Xeon D can do a lot more. It can be a mid range java server, text search engine or high-end development machine. In can be a node inside a web server cluster that takes heavy traffic.
In fact the Xeon D-1540 ($581) makes the low end of the Xeon E5 SKUs such as the E5-2630 (6 cores at 2.3 GHz, 95 W, $612) look pretty bad for a lot of workloads. Why would you pay more for such E5 server that consumes a lot more? The answer is some HPC applications, as our results show. The only advantage such a low end dual socket E5 server has is memory capacity and the fact that you can use two of them (up to 12 cores).
So as long as you do not make the mistake to use it for memory intensive HPC applications (note most HPC apps are memory intensive) and 8 cores is enough for you, the Xeon D is probably the most awesome product Intel has delivered in years, even if it is slightly hidden away from the mainstream.
Where does this leave the ARM server plans?
The Xeon D effectively puts a big almost unbreakable lock on some parts of the server market in the short and mid term (as Intel will undoubtably further improve the Xeon D line). It is hard to see how anyone can offer an server SoC in the short term that can beat the sky high performance per watt ratio when performing dynamic web serving for example.
However, the pricing and power envelope (about 60W in total for a "micro" server) of the Xeon D still leaves quite a bit of room in markets where density and pricing is everything. You do not need Xeon D power to run a caching or static web server as an Atom C2000-level of performance and a lot of DRAM slots will do. There are some chances here, but we would really like to see some real products instead of yet another slide deck with great promises. Frankly we don't think that the standard ARM designs will do. The A57 is probably not strong enough for the "non-micro server" market and it remains to be seen if the A72 will a large enough improvement. More specialized designs such as Cavium Thunder-X, Qualcomms Kryo or Broadcomm Vulcan might still capture a niche market in the foreseeable future.
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Flunk - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Yes, but it's still bad marketing. -D is associated with inferior, overly hot, bad performing Intel chips.IanHagen - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Certainly. From a marketing standpoint it's a pretty poor choice. I agree with wussupi, E4 would haven been a far better name.karpodiem - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
does anyone know where to buy these online? I'm looking for just the board/processor, model # 'X10SDV-TLN4F'All these random/small Supermicro resellers are selling it now, based on some Google searches. They're marking it up in price by at least a hundred bucks, because availability is limited. Anyone know when Newegg might get it in stock?
Looking to do a FreeNAS build - this board + IBM M1015 card in an ATX motherboard (6x4TB drives in RAIDZ2).
ats - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
The TLN4F is the one in most demand and almost no place is able to keep it in stock. There are multiple places that will order it for you for ~1K but wait times can be anywhere from 1 week to 1 month.Jon Tseng - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
> And the reality is that the current SoCs with an ARM ISA do not deliver the necessary per core> performance: they are still micro server SoCs, at best competing with the Atom C2750. So
> currently, there is no ARM SoC competition in the scale out market until something better than
> the A57 hits the market for these big players.
Dude... You really want to have a look at the latest ThunderX parts or the X-Gene 16nm shrinks before you start making unwise statements like that. These aren't waiting around for A57 they are custom ARM architecture designs. Per core performance might not be as hot as Xeon but once you start to throw 48 cores on a die I wouldn't quite call that "at best competing with Avaton".
smoohta - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Link to reviews?ats - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
X-Gene is in the article, any further shrinks are still entirely vapor. ThunderX isn't currently available is is likely to have significantly worse per core performance than Atom C2k series and worse than A57. All the cores in the world don't do jack if the ST isn't there. And ST performance IS a barrier even in scale out. For general scale out, C2750 was found fairly wanting because of the ST performance, and neither X-Gene nor ThunderX even compete with C2750 in ST performance... QED.mczak - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
He said "currently". The X-Gene 16nm cores might offer some competition who knows - but those are X-Gene 3 whereas you can't even buy anything with X-Gene 2 28nm ones right now... Likewise, ThunderX servers have been announced, but I haven't seen any reviews yet.name99 - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Look at the ThunderX parts HOW? Cavium releases fsck-all information about them. No-one knows if they are even OoO, how wide they are, etc.Yes, there are 48 cores on a SoC; and presumably they will do well for tasks like memcached that like lots of low-performance parallelism. But right now, we have ZERO evidence that a ThunderX part is a better single-threaded core than A57, let alone that it's comparable to Broadwell.
der - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
NOICE FAM!