The Intel Xeon E7-8800 v3 Review: The POWER8 Killer?
by Johan De Gelas on May 8, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- IT Computing
- Intel
- Xeon
- Haswell
- Enterprise
- server
- Enterprise CPUs
- POWER
- POWER8
POWER8 Servers: The Reality Check
As we've just seen, the specs of the POWER8 as announced at launch are very impressive. But what about the in the real world? The top models (10-12 at 4 GHz+, 2TB per socket) are still limited to the extremely expensive E870/E880, which typically costs around 3 times as much (or more) as a comparable Xeon E7 system. But there is light at the end of the tunnel: "PowerLinux" quad socket systems are more expensive than comparable x86 systems, but only by 10 to 30%.
The real competition for x86 must probably come from the third parties of the OpenPower Fondation. IBM sells them POWER8 chips at much more reasonable prices ($2k - $3k), so it is possible to build a reasonably priced POWER8 system. The POWER8 chips sold to third parties are somewhat "lighter" versions, but that is more an advantage than you would think. For example, by keeping the clockspeed a bit lower, the power consumption is lower (190W TDP). These chips also have only 4 (instead of 8) memory buffer chips, which "limits" them to 1 TB of memory, but again this saves quite a bit of power, between 50W and 80W. In other words, the POWER8 chips available to third parties are much more reasonable and even more competitive than the power gobbling, ultra expensive behemoths that got all the attention at launch.
Tyan already has an one socket server and several Taiwanese (Wistron) and Chinese vendors are developing 2 socket systems. Quad socket models are not yet on the horizon as far as we know, but is probably going to change soon.
POWER8 vs. Xeon E5 v3: SPECing It Out
Unfortunately we did not have access to a full blown POWER8 system at this time. But as our loyal readers know, we do not limit our server testing to the x86 world (see here and here) . So until a POWER8 system arrives, we'll have to check out the available industry standard benchmarks. To that end we looked up the SPEC CPU2006 numbers for a single socket CPU.
The 12 cores inside the POWER8 - the single socket chips found in the more reasonable priced servers - perform very well. The integer performance is only a few percentages lower than the Intel chip and POWER8's floating point performance is well ahead of the Xeon.
Overall the POWER8 is quite capable of keeping up with the Xeon E5-2699v3. And don't let the "2.3 GHz" official clockspeed fool you into thinking that the Xeons are clocked unnecessarily low, either: in SPECint, the XEON is running at 2.8 GHz most of the time.
Ultimately, the POWER8 is able to offer slightly higher raw performance than the Intel CPUs, however it just won't be able to do so at the same performance/watt. Meanwhile the reasonable pricing of the POWER8 chips should result in third party servers that are strongly competitive with the Xeon on a performance-per-dollar basis. Reasonably priced, well performing dual and quad socket Linux on Power servers should be possible very soon.
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Dmcq - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Well they'll sell where performance is an absolute must but they won't pose a problem to Intel as they won't take a large part of the market and they'd keep prices high. I see the main danger to Intel being in 64 bit ARMs eating the server market from below. I suppose one could have cheap and low power POWER machines to attack the main market but somehow it just seems unlikely with their background.Guest8 - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Uh did you see Anandtech's reviews on the latest ARM server? The thing barely keeps up with an Avoton. Intel is well aware of ARM based servers and has preemptively disARMed the threat. If ARM could ever deliver Xeon class performance it would look like Power8.melgross - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Chip TDP is mostly a concern for the chip itself. Other areas contribute far more waste heat than the CPU does.PowerTrumps - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Power doesn't need to have a TDP of 1000W but 200W is nothing given the performance and efficiency advantage of the processors and Power hypervisor. When you can consolidate 2, 4 and 10 2 socket Intel servers into 1 x 2 socket Power8 server that is 10 x 2 x 135W = 2700 overall Watts vs 400W with the Power server. Power reduces the overall energy, cooling and rack space consumption.KAlmquist - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
$4115 E5-2699 (18C, 2.3 Ghz (3.6 Ghz turbo), max memory 768 GB)$5896 E7-8880 (18C, 2.3 Ghz (3.1 Ghz turbo), max memory 1536 GB)
That's a big premium for the E7--enough that it probably doesn't make sense to buy an 8 socket system just to run a bunch of applications in parallel. The E7 makes sense only if you need more than 36 cores to have access to the same memory.
PowerTrumps - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
I really enjoyed the article as well as the many data and comparison charts. It is unfortunate that most of your statements, assessments and comparisons about Power and with Intel to Power were either wrong, misleading, not fully explained or out of context. I invite the author to contact me and I will be happy to walk you through all of this so you can update this article as well as consider a future article that shows the true advantage Power8 and OpenPower truly has in the data center and the greater value available to customers.KAlmquist - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
I would be surprised if anybody working for Anandtech is going to contact an anonymous commentator. You can point out portions of the article that you think are wrong or misleading in this comment section.To do a really good article on Power8, Anandtech needs a vendor to give Anandtech access to a system to review.
PowerTrumps - Sunday, May 10, 2015 - link
Admittedly I assumed when I registered for the PowerTrumps account some time ago I used a email address which they could look up. But, your point is taken. Brett Murphy with Software Information Systems (aka SIS) www.thinksis.com. Email at bmurphy@thinksis.com. If I pointed out all of the mistakes my comment would look like a blog which many don't appreciate. I have my own blog for that. I like well written articles and happy to accept criticism or shortcomings with IBM Power - just use accurate data and not misrepresent anything. Before Anandtech reviews a Power8 server, my assessment is they need to understand what makes Power tick and how it is different than Intel or SPARC for that matter. Hope they contact me.thunng8 - Sunday, May 10, 2015 - link
I too would like a more detailed review of the Power8.Some of the text in the article made me laugh on how wrong they are.
For example, the great surprise that Intel is not on top.. Well anandtech has never test any Power systems before..
And it is laughable to make any conclusions based on running of 7zip. Just about any serious enterprise server benchmark shows a greater than 2x performance advantage per core in favor of Power compared to the best Xeons. So that 50% advantage is way less than expected.
Btw Power7 for most of its life bested Xeon in performance by very large margins. It is just now that IBM have opened up Power to other vendor that makes it exciting.
JohanAnandtech - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link
I welcome constructive critism. And yes, we only had access to an IBM Power8 dev machine, so we only got a small part of the machine (1 core/2GB)."Some of the text in the article made me laugh on how wrong they are."
That is pretty low. Without any pointer or argument, nobody can check your claims. Please state your concerns or mail me.