The Intel Xeon W Review: W-2195, W-2155, W-2123, W-2104 and W-2102 Tested
by Ian Cutress & Joe Shields on July 30, 2018 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Xeon
- Workstation
- ECC
- Skylake-SP
- Skylake-X
- Xeon-W
- Xeon Scalable
Benchmarking Performance: CPU Legacy Tests
Our legacy tests represent benchmarks that were once at the height of their time. Some of these are industry standard synthetics, and we have data going back over 10 years. All of the data here has been rerun on Windows 10, and we plan to go back several generations of components to see how performance has evolved.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3D Particle Movement v1
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. This is the original version, written in the style of a typical non-computer science student coding up an algorithm for their theoretical problem, and comes without any non-obvious optimizations not already performed by the compiler, such as false sharing.
CineBench 11.5 and 10
Cinebench is a widely known benchmarking tool for measuring performance relative to MAXON's animation software Cinema 4D. Cinebench has been optimized over a decade and focuses on purely CPU horsepower, meaning if there is a discrepancy in pure throughput characteristics, Cinebench is likely to show that discrepancy. Arguably other software doesn't make use of all the tools available, so the real world relevance might purely be academic, but given our large database of data for Cinebench it seems difficult to ignore a small five minute test. We run the modern version 15 in this test, as well as the older 11.5 and 10 due to our back data.
x264 HD 3.0
Similarly, the x264 HD 3.0 package we use here is also kept for historic regressional data. The latest version is 5.0.1, and encodes a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 file. Version 3.0 only performs the same test on a 720p file, and in most circumstances the software performance hits its limit on high end processors, but still works well for mainstream and low-end. Also, this version only takes a few minutes, whereas the latest can take over 90 minutes to run.
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mode_13h - Monday, July 30, 2018 - link
Just the fact that you need to map your VMs to stay on the same physical core, for best performance (i.e. so that the memory is local to it). If you do that, TR is actually a great VM solution.Death666Angel - Monday, July 30, 2018 - link
That doesn't sound so complicated as to be a "situation" for someone dealing with VMs. :) Seems like a general setup config thing that you just check off when you do it once.mode_13h - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
Sorry, I meant "same physical die". Actually, best results are from setting affinity at the CCX (i.e. 4-core) granularity.SanX - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
The day ARM announced it developed 8 and 16-core server and supercomputer chips at their usual price around $25 per 5 billion transistors, Intel Xeon prices would plunge 10-50x.Infy2 - Monday, July 30, 2018 - link
It would be helpful on those charts if there was an indicator how many cores/threads in CPU has.Ian Cutress - Monday, July 30, 2018 - link
We used to have that info in the graphs, however people found it redundant when it was elsewhere, and price/power was requested instead. It's hard to put all the info of every part into every graph!Death666Angel - Monday, July 30, 2018 - link
Can that not be coded as a tooltip/mouse-over text? That would be neat and not add clutter while adding information to those who want it. :)Ian Cutress - Monday, July 30, 2018 - link
Graphs are images generated locally from the data. I'm not au fait with how our back end works, but that's require more than a simple rewriteDeath666Angel - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
Alright. :) Shame though, would be a useful feature for some. Maybe add it to an overhaul list, if such a thing exists. :)lkuzmanov - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
I'm with Infy2 on this one, not sure who protested, but I think something like (10/20) next to the model wouldn't be too distracting or cost too much screen space. I caught myself having to go back to the first page of the article to check the core count of the Xeon parts. That said - great content, you're one of my daily go-to sites.