The Intel Xeon E5 v4 Review: Testing Broadwell-EP With Demanding Server Workloads

SAP S&D

The SAP S&D 2-Tier benchmark has always been one of my favorites. This is probably the most real world benchmark of all the server benchmarks done by the vendors. It is a full-blown application living on top of a heavy relational database. And don't forget that SAP is one of the most successful software companies out there, the market leader of Enterprise Resource Planning. 

We analyzed the SAP Benchmark in-depth in one of our earlier articles:

• 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 us see how the new Xeon E5 fares in this ERP benchmark.

(est) = Preliminary data

The ever-increasing L3 cache, high core counts, and better NUMA coherency support of Broadwell-EP play well with SAP. It is almost like Intel builds these Xeons for SAP alone. The result is that the current Xeon is no less than 3 times faster than the Xeon 2690 (v1).