The Intel Xeon E7-8800 v3 Review: The POWER8 Killer?

SAP S&D Benchmark

The SAP SD (Sales and Distribution, 2-Tier Internet Configuration) benchmark is an interesting benchmark as it is a real-world client-server application. It is one of those rare industry benchmarks that actually means something to the real IT professionals. Even better, the SAP ERP software is a prime example of where these Xeon E7 v2 chips will be used. We looked at SAP's benchmark database for these results.

Most of the results below all run on Windows 2008/2012 and MS SQL Server (both 64-bit). Every 2-Tier Sales & Distribution benchmark was performed with SAP's latest ERP 6 Enhancement Package 4. We analyzed the SAP Benchmark in-depth in one of our earlier articles. The profile of the benchmark has remained the same:

• Very parallel resulting in excellent scaling
• Low to medium IPC, mostly due to "branchy" code
• Somewhat limited by memory bandwidth
• Likes large caches (memory latency)
• Very sensitive to sync ("cache coherency") latency

Let's see how the quad Xeon compares to the previous Intel generation, the cheaper dual socket systems, and the RISC competition.

When we said that the competition in the high-end market was heating up, we were not kidding. The dual socket (24-core) S824 beats the dual socket Xeon E5 by a large margin (+35%), despite the latter having 50% more cores (36 vs 24).

At IBM's website, this server is priced at $65k, but the actual street prices are around $35k, slightly below what a typical similar quad Xeon costs (around $40k) .Of course, IBM should make it easier for small enterprises to get their hardware quickly at a decent price. But this shows that it is not impossible that POWER servers can become an alternative to the typical x86 systems... just not from IBM's webstore. The POWER8 system might be somewhat cheaper to acquire than the HP DL580 Gen9, but that Intel system is still almost 40% faster, so IBM is not an alternative quite yet. Then again, IBM is a lot more competitive than a few years ago. The S824 is not that far behind the Quad Xeon E7 v2, so it is a good thing that the new Xeon E7 offers about 20% better performance than the latter.

So who is on the top of server foodchain?

They might be power hungry, but the new POWER8 has made the Enterprise line of IBM more competitive than ever. Gone are the days that IBM needed more CPU sockets than Intel to get the top spot. Nevertheless, it should be noted that you can get several 8-socket Xeon systems for the price of one IBM E870 enterprise server.