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
Single-Threaded Integer Performance
The LZMA compression benchmark only measures a part of the performance of some real-world server applications (file server, backup, etc.). The reason why we keep using this benchmark is that it allows us to isolate the "hard to extract instruction level parallelism (ILP)" and "sensitive to memory parallelism and latency" integer performance. That is the kind of integer performance you need in most server applications.
One more reason to test performance in this manner is that the 7-zip source code is available under the GNU LGPL license. That allows us to recompile the source code on every machine with the -O2 optimization with gcc 4.8.2.
The Xeon E5-2650L Haswell core is only able to boost to 2.5 GHz, while the Xeon D has a newer core (Broadwell) and is capable of 2.6 GHz. Still, the Xeon E5 is 6% faster. The most likely explanation is that the Xeon E5-2650L (65W TDP) keeps turboboost higher for a longer time than the Xeon D (45W TDP).
The Xeon D and Atom C2750 run at the same clockspeed in this single threaded task (2.6 GHz), but you can see how much difference a wide complex architecture makes. The Broadwell Core is able to run about twice as many instructions in parallel as the Silvermont core. The Haswell/Broadwell core results clearly show that well designed wide architectures remain quite capable, even in "low ILP" (Instruction Level Parallelism) code.
Let's see how the chips compare in decompression. Decompression is an even lower IPC (Instructions Per Clock) workload, as it is pretty branch intensive and depends on the latencies of the multiply and shift instructions.
The Xeon E5 runs at 2.5 GHz, the Xeon D at 2.6 GHz, the Xeon E3-1230L at 2.8 GHz, The Xeon E3-1265L can reach 3.7 GHz. The decompression results follow the same logic. There does not seem to be a difference between a Broadwell, Haswell or Ivy Bridge core: performance is almost linear with (turboboost) clockspeed. The only exception is the Xeon E3-1240 which turboboost to 3.8 GHz, but outperforms the other by a larger than expected. The explanation is pretty simple: the higher TDP (80 W) allows the chip to sustain turbo boost clock speeds for much longer.
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extide - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
So, I was thinking last night, that this chip is THE PERFECT enthusiast chip! All Intel needs to do is release an unlocked and socketed version (although that would be complex because there is currently no platform for it ...) although if we could get at least an unlocked version on an enthusiast style board it would be awesome.Think about it:
8 Broadwell cores -- Great!
12MB L3 -- Great!
24 Lanes PCIe 3.0 -- More than 16 or even skylakes rumored 20, pretty good. You could do things like 16x + 8x, or 8x + 8x + 4x + 4x (the two 4x being m.2 ssd's) which would support CF or SLI quite well and some fast ssd's.
2ch DDR4 -- plenty for gaming and most enthusiast applications
Dual 10GbE -- Just added Gravvy here, but would def help adoption of 10g in the enthusiast realm.
COME ON INTEL!!
extide - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
Also, I forgot to add:This would be a great intermediate between the current regular consumer stuff (LGA 115x) and HPDE (LGA 2011x) -- A lot of people really see the LGA 2011 platform as overkill, even for enthusiasts, and it gets so expensive, with quad channel ddr4 and all that. This chip just seems to make so much sense. Now if intel priced it no more than the $500 mark, that would be awesome. Imagine, if AMD was more competitive, we might actually have that5 scenario.... Hopefully Zen is just great!
Namisecond - Saturday, June 27, 2015 - link
Intel's tray price for this chip is listed at $199 for the 4-core and $581 for the 8-core. The price for the CPU+motherboard is almost $1K for the 8 core. which indicates the problem is not in the price of the chip itself.If you want cheap and low power consumption, I'd direct you to the S1150 platform with Xeon E3 V3 "L" series (13-45W) processors.
spikebike - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
For a home machine, small server, workstation, or similar the Xeon D 1520 looks even better. Faster clock, 1/3rd the price, same maximum ram, ecc, etc. Sure it's got 4 cores/8threads instead of more, but for many use cases that's not a big limitation. In quite a few cases spending the $400 different on RAM or SSDs will make a bigger difference.hifiaudio2 - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Where can you get a 1520? Google searching is not finding anything for sale...hifiaudio2 - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
If I cannot find the 1520 for sale, what is the best bang for the buck i3 and MB combo (want to use ECC ram as well) for a Media server/transcode/nas? Low TDP, etc..jaziniho - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
Any word on whether HP plan to make a Moonshot cartridge featuring Xeon D? the 45W TDP seems to match up with some of the previous chips they have used.jeffsci - Monday, June 29, 2015 - link
Why do the results use a variety of OSS compilers? For an Intel Xeon processor, the Intel compilers are the most reliable. Is Open64 actively developed for Intel processors? And switching from GCC 4.8 to 4.9 with different flags...how is this even remotely scientific?needforsuv - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link
so they just done to the 'regular' 4/8 i7/e3 what they did to the C2D in making the C2Q but more sophisticated I like it now wheres that lga 115x 8 coretabascosauz - Sunday, July 19, 2015 - link
I hope that Mr. de Gelas will continue to learn and improve as a writer, because the grammar in this article is, in numerous places, rather iffy and AT has traditionally excelled in delivering detailed, grammatically correct content.