Investigating Cavium's ThunderX: The First ARM Server SoC With Ambition
by Johan De Gelas on June 15, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- SoCs
- IT Computing
- Enterprise
- Enterprise CPUs
- Microserver
- Cavium
Selecting the Competition
In setting up our benchmarks, we chose four different Intel SKUs to compete with the Cavium ThunderX. Our choices are not ideal (as we only have a limited number of SKUs available) but there is still some logic behind the SKU choice.
The Xeon E5-2640 v4 (10 cores @2.4 GHz, $939) has Intel's latest server core (Broadwell EP) and features a price tag in the ballpark of the ThunderX ($800) along with a low 90W TDP.
The Xeon E5-2690 v3 (12 cores @2.6 GHz, $2090) is a less optimal choice, but we wanted an SKU with a higher TDP, in case that the actual power consumption of the Thunder-X is higher than what can be expected from the official 120W TDP. To be frank, it was the only SKU that was faster than the E5-2640 v4 that we had. The Xeon E5-2699v4 ($4115, 145W TDP) did not make much sense to us in this comparison... so we settled for the Xeon E5-2690v3.
And then we added all the Xeon Ds we had available. At first sight it's not fair to compare a 45W TDP SoC to our 120W ThunderX. But the Xeon D-1557 is in the same price range as the Cavium ThunderX, and is targeted more or less at the same market. And although they offer fewer network and SATA interfaces, Cavium has to beat these kind of Xeon Ds performance wise, otherwise Intel's performance per watt advantage will steal Cavium's thunder.
The Xeon D-1581 is the most expensive Xeon D, but it is Intel's current server SoC flagship. But if the ARM Server SoCs start beating competitively priced Xeon Ds, Intel can always throw this one in the fray with a lower price. It is the SoC the ARM server vendors have to watch.
Configuration
Most of our testing was conducted on Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS. We did upgrade this distribution to the latest release (14.04.4), which gives us more extensive hardware support. However, to ensure support for the ThunderX, the gcc compiler was upgraded to 5.2. In case of the ThunderX, the kernel was also 4.2.0, while the Intel systems still used kernel 3.19.
The reason why we did not upgrade the kernel is simply that we know from experience that this can generate all kinds of problems. In the case of the ThunderX using a newer kernel was necessary, while for the Intel CPUs we simply checked that there were no big differences with the new Ubuntu 16.04. The only difference that we could see there is that some of our software now does not compile on 16.04 (Sysbench, Perlbench). As we already waste a lot of time with debugging all kinds of dependency trouble, we kept it simple.
Gigabyte R120-T30 (1U)
The full specs of the server can be found here.
| CPU | One ThunderX CN8890 |
| RAM | 128GB (4x32GB) DDR4-2133 |
| Internal Disks | 2x SanDisk CloudSpeed Ultra 800GB |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte MT30-GS0 |
| BIOS version | 1/28/2016 |
| PSU | Delta Electronics 400w 80 Plus Gold |
Supermicro X10SDV-7TP8F and X10SDV-12C-TLN4F (2U case)
| CPU | Xeon D-1557 (1.5 GHz, 12 cores, 45 W TDP) Xeon D-1581 (1.8 GHz, 16 cores, 65 W TDP) |
| RAM | 64 GB (4x16 GB) DDR4-2133 |
| Internal Disks | 2x Intel SSD3500 400GB |
| Motherboard | Supermicro X10SDV-7TP8F Supermicro X10SDV-12C-TLN4F |
| BIOS version | 5/5/2016 |
| PSU | Delta Electronics 400w 80 Plus Gold |
Hyperthreading, Turbo Boost, C1 and C6 were enabled in the BIOS.
Intel's Xeon E5 Server – S2600WT (2U Chassis)
This is the same server that we used in our latest Xeon v4 review.
| CPU | Xeon E5-2640 v4 (2.4 GHz, 10 cores, 90 W TDP) Xeon E5-2690 v3 (2.6 GHz, 12 cores, 135 W TDP) |
| RAM | 128GB (8x16GB) Kingston DDR-2400 |
| Internal Disks | 2x Intel SSD3500 400GB |
| Motherboard | Intel Server Board Wildcat Pass |
| BIOS version | 1/28/2016 |
| PSU | Delta Electronics 750W DPS-750XB A (80+ Platinum) |
Hyperthreading, Turboost, C1 and C6 were enabled in the BIOS.
Other Notes
All 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 in our Sizing Servers Lab.
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willis936 - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
Are you sure that the there are more cores at lower clocks to keep voltage lower? Power consumption is proportional to v^2*f.ddriver - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
Say what? Go back, read my previous post again, and if you are going to respond, make sure it is legible.willis936 - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
Alright well if you don't understand why many slower cores are more power efficient even if there was a 0 cycle penalty on context switching then you aren't worth having this discussion with.blaktron - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
48 cores of server processing on 16mb of l2 and 4 channels of RAM? What is this thing designed for. Will be like running single channel celerons as server processors, so decent hypervisor hosts are out, and so is any database work more complex than dynamic web pages.Haravikk - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Facebook is specifically mentioned as being interested in this, so dynamic web-pages is definitely a valid use-case here. HHVM for example is pretty light on memory usage (so is PHP7 now), especially in high demand cases where you're really only running a single set of scripts, probably cached in a compiled form, plus both scale really well across as many cores as you can throw at them.Things like nginx and MariaDB will be the same, so they're absolutely intended use-cases for this kind of chip, and I think it should be very good at it.
blaktron - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
With no L3 and slow RAM access I'm not sure where you think the scrips will cache. Assuming you ran them on bare metal (horrifying waste of compute) there would be enough, but if you had docker instances or quick spin vms doing your work (as 99% of web servers are) then each instance will only get the tiniest slice of cache to work with. It would be like running your servers, as I said, on a bank of celerons. Except celerons have L3 and don't carry 12 cores per memory channel.spaceship9876 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Hopefully someone will release a server chip using 64 cortex A73 cpu cores, i'm pretty sure the cortex a73 will be more power efficient than xeon d. Xeon d beats cortex a57 in power efficiency but i'm pretty sure than cortex a72 will be similar and cortex a73 will beat it.Flunk - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
ARM with ambition?I've heard that before, nothing came of it.
CajunArson - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Interesting article. This does appear to be the first semi-credible part from an ARM server vendor.Having said that, the energy efficiency table at the end should put to rest any misconceived notions that ARM is somehow magically energy efficient while X86 isn't.
Considering that Xeon E5-2690 v3 is a 4.5 year old Sandy Bridge part made on a 32 nm process and it still has better performance-per-watt than the best ARM server parts available in 2016, it's pretty obvious that Intel has done an excellent job with power efficiency.
kgardas - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
2 CajunArson: (1) you can't compare energy efficiency of CPUs made on different nodes. 28nm versus 14nm? This is apple to oranges. (2) Xeon E5-2690 *v3* is Haswell and not Sandy Bridge and it's not 4.5 years definitely.