The Intel Xeon E5 v4 Review: Testing Broadwell-EP With Demanding Server Workloads
by Johan De Gelas on March 31, 2016 12:30 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Xeon
- Enterprise
- Enterprise CPUs
- Broadwell
Benchmark Configuration and Methodology
All of our testing was conducted on Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS. Admittedly, that might seem like an old distribution to some of our readers, but enterprises prefer stability and support over the latest software. We did upgrade this distribution to the latest release (14.04.4), which gives us more extensive hardware support.
To make things more interesting, we tested 4 different SKUs and included the previous generation Xeon E5 v3s, the Xeon E5-2697v2 (high end Ivy Bridge EP), and the E5-2690 (high end Sandy Bridge EP). We even included the Xeon X5680 for comparison reasons. The Xeon E5-2695 v4 is interesting to compare to the Xeon E5-2699 v3 as it has the same core count and more or less the same clockspeed. That way we could quantify the improvement that the Broadwell core offers over the Haswell core.
Last but not least, we want to note how the performance graphs have been color-coded. Orange is the latest generation (v4), dark blue the previous one (v3), and light blue is the generation that the current (v4) is (arguably) supposed to replace (Xeon E5 v1).
Intel's Xeon E5 Server – S2600WT (2U Chassis)
| CPU | Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2699v4 (2.2 GHz, 22c, 55MB L3, 145W) Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2695v4 (2.1 GHz, 18c, 45MB L3, 145W) Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2699v3 (2.3 GHz, 18c, 45MB L3, 145W) Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2695v3 (2.3 GHz, 14c, 35MB L3, 120W) Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2667v3 (3.2 GHz, 8c, 20MB L3, 135W) |
| RAM | 128GB (8x16GB) Kingston DDR-2400 |
| Internal Disks | 2x Intel SSD3500 400GB |
| Motherboard | Intel Server Board Wildcat Pass |
| Chipset | Intel Wellsburg B0 |
| BIOS version | 1/28/2016 |
| PSU | Delta Electronics 750W DPS-750XB A (80+ Platinum) |
The typical BIOS settings can be seen below.
SuperMicro 6027R-73DARF (2U Chassis)
| CPU | Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2697 v2 (2.7GHz, 12c, 30MB L3, 130W) Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2690 (2.9GHz, 8c, 20MB L3, 135W) |
| RAM | 128GB (8x16GB) Samsung at 1866 MHz |
| Internal Disks | 2x Intel SSD3500 400GB |
| Motherboard | SuperMicro X9DRD-7LN4F |
| Chipset | Intel C602J |
| BIOS version | R 3.0a (December the 6th, 2013) |
| PSU | Supermicro 740W PWS-741P-1R (80+ Platinum) |
All C-states are enabled in both the BIOS.
Other Notes
Both servers are fed by a standard European 230V (16 Amps max.) power line. The room temperature is monitored and kept at 23°C by our Airwell CRACs.
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petar_b - Saturday, August 27, 2016 - link
Thanks Phil_Oracle, Brutalizer and Anand for this discussion. I have learned a lot from reading different opinions. I am working with IBM and Oracle software products, and from my small experience, Xeons are pathetic when compared to POWER or SPARC. To do same operation at home Xeon it takes 10x more time than what it takes the corporate server to do. I have double memory than corporate server and yet no help from it.someonesomewherelse - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
Btw how locked down are these Xeons and their motherboards in regards to overclocking? Assuming you could provide enough power and cooling could you reach a decent overclock? Obviously nobody is going to do that for mission crittical servers/workstations, but if I had too much money could I get a quad or octa core system with as much cores possible and at least try to overclock them?