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
Comparing With the Other ARMs
We did not have access to any recent Cortex-A57 or X-Gene platform to run the full SPEC CPU2006 suite. But we can still combine our previous findings with those that have been published on the 7-cpu.com. The first X-Gene 1 result is our own measurement, the second one is the best we could find.
| SKU | Clock | Baseline Xeon D Compress | Baseline Xeon D Decompress |
| Atom C2720 | 2.4 | 1687 | 2114 |
| X-Gene 1 (AT bench) | 2.4 | 1580 | 1864 |
| X-Gene 1 (best) | 2.4 | 1770 | 1980 |
| Cortex-A57 | 1.9 | 1500 | 2330 |
| ThunderX | 2.0 | 1547 | 2042 |
| Xeon D1557 | 1.5-2.1 | 3079 | 2320 |
| Xeon E5-2640 v4 | 2.4-2.6 | 3755 | 2943 |
| Xeon E5-2690 v3 | 2.6-3.5 | 4599 | 3811 |
Let's translate this to percentages, where we compare the Thunder-X performance to the Xeon D and the Cortex-A57, two architectures it must try to beat. The first one is to open a broader market, the second one to justify the development of a homegrown ARMv8 microarchitecture.
| SKU | Clock | Baseline Xeon D Compress | Baseline Xeon D Decompress | Baseline A57 Compress | Baseline A57 Decompress |
| Atom C2720 | 2.4 | 55% | 91% | 112% | 91% |
| X-Gene (AT bench) | 2.4 | 51% | 80% | 105% | 80% |
| X-Gene (best) | 2.4 | 57% | 85% | 118% | 85% |
| Cortex-A57 | 1.9 | 49% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| ThunderX | 2.0 | 50% | 88% | 103% | 88% |
| Xeon D1557 | 2.1 | 100% | 100% | 205% | 100% |
| Xeon E5-2640 v4 | 2.4 | 122% | 127% | 250% | 126% |
| Xeon E5-2690 v3 | 3.5 | 149% | 164% | 307% | 164% |
First of all, these benchmarks should be placed in perspective: they tend to have a different profile than most server applications. For example compression relies a lot on memory latency and TLB efficiency. Decompression relies on integer instructions (shift, multiply). Since this test has unpredictable branches, the ThunderX has an advantage.
The ThunderX at 2 GHz performs more or less like an A57 core at the same speed. Considering that AMD only got eight A57 cores inside a power envelope of 32W using similar process technology, you could imagine that a A57 chip would be able to fit 32 cores at the most in a 120W TDP envelope. So Cavium did quite well fitting about 50% more cores inside the same power envelope using an old 28 nm high-k metal gate process.
Nevertheless, a 120W Xeon E5 offers about 2.5-3 times higher compression performance. The gap is indeed much smaller in decompression, where the wide Broadwell core is only 13% (!) faster than the narrow ThunderX core (compare the Xeon D-1557 with the ThunderX).
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JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Good suggestion. I have been using an ipmi client to manage several other servers, like the IBM servers. However, such a GUI client is still a bit more userfriendly, ipmi commands can get complicated if you don't use them regularly. The thing is that HP and Intel's BMC GUI are a lot easier to use and more reliable.fanofanand - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I think you may have an inaccurate figure of 141 at idle (in the graph) for the Thunder. "makes us suspect that the chip is consuming between 40 and 50W at idle, as measured at the wall"JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
If you look at the Column "peak vs idle", you see 82W. At peak, we assume that a 120W TDP chip will probably need about 130W. 130W - 82W (both measured at the wall) = 50W for the SoC alone at idle measured at the wall, so anywhere between 40-50W in reality. My Calculation is a "guestimate", but it is clear that the Cavium chip needs much more in idle than the Intel chips.(10-15W) .djayjp - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Many spelling/grammar issues here. It impacts readability. Please read before posting.djayjp - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
That is to say in the article.mariush - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
These guys are already working on ThunderX2 (54 cores, 3 Ghz , 14nm , ARMv8) and they already have functional chips : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei9uVskwPNEMeteor2 - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
It's always jam tomorrow, isn't it? Intel is working on new chips too, you know.beginner99 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
It loses very clearly in performance/watt to Xeon-D. In this segment the lower price doesn't matter in that case and the fact that it has a process disadvantage doesn't matter either. What counts is the end result. And I doubt it would cost $800 if made on 14/16nm. I mean why would anyone buying this take the risk? Safer bet to go with Intel also due to more flexible use (single and multi threaded). The latency issue is mentioned but downplayed.blaktron - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
So downplayed. Anandtech desperately wants ARM servers, but its a solution looking for a problem. Big web front ends running on bare metal are such a small percentage of the server market that developing for it seems stupid. Xeon-D was already in development for SANs, they just repurposed it for docker and nginx.Senti - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Very nice article. I especially liked the emphasis on relations of test numbers and real world workloads and what was problematic during the testing.It would be great to see the same style desktop CPU review (Zen?) form you instead of mix of reprinted marketing hype with silly benchmark numbers dump that plagues this site for quite some time now.
Some annoying typos here and there, like "It is clear that the ThunderX is a match for high frequency trading", but nothing really bad.