Intel Xeon E Six-Core Review: E-2186G, E-2176G, E-2146G, and E-2136 Tested
by Ian Cutress on November 5, 2018 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Xeon
- Enterprise CPUs
- Xeon E
CPU Performance: Web and Legacy Tests
While more the focus of low-end and small form factor systems, web-based benchmarks are notoriously difficult to standardize. Modern web browsers are frequently updated, with no recourse to disable those updates, and as such there is difficulty in keeping a common platform. The fast paced nature of browser development means that version numbers (and performance) can change from week to week. Despite this, web tests are often a good measure of user experience: a lot of what most office work is today revolves around web applications, particularly email and office apps, but also interfaces and development environments. Our web tests include some of the industry standard tests, as well as a few popular but older tests.
We have also included our legacy benchmarks in this section, representing a stack of older code for popular benchmarks.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
WebXPRT 3: Modern Real-World Web Tasks, including AI
The company behind the XPRT test suites, Principled Technologies, has recently released the latest web-test, and rather than attach a year to the name have just called it ‘3’. This latest test (as we started the suite) has built upon and developed the ethos of previous tests: user interaction, office compute, graph generation, list sorting, HTML5, image manipulation, and even goes as far as some AI testing.
For our benchmark, we run the standard test which goes through the benchmark list seven times and provides a final result. We run this standard test four times, and take an average.
Users can access the WebXPRT test at http://principledtechnologies.com/benchmarkxprt/webxprt/
WebXPRT 2015: HTML5 and Javascript Web UX Testing
The older version of WebXPRT is the 2015 edition, which focuses on a slightly different set of web technologies and frameworks that are in use today. This is still a relevant test, especially for users interacting with not-the-latest web applications in the market, of which there are a lot. Web framework development is often very quick but with high turnover, meaning that frameworks are quickly developed, built-upon, used, and then developers move on to the next, and adjusting an application to a new framework is a difficult arduous task, especially with rapid development cycles. This leaves a lot of applications as ‘fixed-in-time’, and relevant to user experience for many years.
Similar to WebXPRT3, the main benchmark is a sectional run repeated seven times, with a final score. We repeat the whole thing four times, and average those final scores.
Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks
Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a accrued test over a series of javascript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.
Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics. We report this final score.
Google Octane 2.0: Core Web Compute
A popular web test for several years, but now no longer being updated, is Octane, developed by Google. Version 2.0 of the test performs the best part of two-dozen compute related tasks, such as regular expressions, cryptography, ray tracing, emulation, and Navier-Stokes physics calculations.
The test gives each sub-test a score and produces a geometric mean of the set as a final result. We run the full benchmark four times, and average the final results.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: Core Web Compute
Even older than Octane is Kraken, this time developed by Mozilla. This is an older test that does similar computational mechanics, such as audio processing or image filtering. Kraken seems to produce a highly variable result depending on the browser version, as it is a test that is keenly optimized for.
The main benchmark runs through each of the sub-tests ten times and produces an average time to completion for each loop, given in milliseconds. We run the full benchmark four times and take an average of the time taken.
3DPM v1: Naïve Code Variant of 3DPM v2.1
The first legacy test in the suite is the first version of our 3DPM benchmark. This is the ultimate naïve version of the code, as if it was written by scientist with no knowledge of how computer hardware, compilers, or optimization works (which in fact, it was at the start). This represents a large body of scientific simulation out in the wild, where getting the answer is more important than it being fast (getting a result in 4 days is acceptable if it’s correct, rather than sending someone away for a year to learn to code and getting the result in 5 minutes).
In this version, the only real optimization was in the compiler flags (-O2, -fp:fast), compiling it in release mode, and enabling OpenMP in the main compute loops. The loops were not configured for function size, and one of the key slowdowns is false sharing in the cache. It also has long dependency chains based on the random number generation, which leads to relatively poor performance on specific compute microarchitectures.
3DPM v1 can be downloaded with our 3DPM v2 code here: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)
x264 HD 3.0: Older Transcode Test
This transcoding test is super old, and was used by Anand back in the day of Pentium 4 and Athlon II processors. Here a standardized 720p video is transcoded with a two-pass conversion, with the benchmark showing the frames-per-second of each pass. This benchmark is single-threaded, and between some micro-architectures we seem to actually hit an instructions-per-clock wall.
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GTVic - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link
I'm wondering what is the status on the W-Series. Seems like no update/launches for over 1 year?CallumS - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link
These look great for SMB finance/inventory management/ERP applications where low latency and high single thread performance is often most beneficial. Or where software is licensed per core. Particularly if they are available within servers with OK remote management functionality at decent price points. I'd love to be able to recommend 3 or 4 of them, and the presumably upcoming 8 core configuration when it is are available, in 1U servers to SMBs rather than Xeon-SP configurations.The Intel Xeon-SP configurations are obviously still going to be the best performing and value for a lot of large enterprise/scale workloads but for smaller organisations and applications only used by under a 100 users, having the simplicity (i.e. no NUMA configuration/consideration requirements) and the performance benefits of a leaner configuration would be great. Plus, having 3 or 4 identical servers with SSD drives in RAID1 could dramatically simplify and improve a lot of local hardware related DR capabilities for organisations with moderate budgets and requirements (essentially an unplug of production SSD drives and move to another/test server).
From a market competition perspective, unfortunately it doesn't look like there is any other decent options for entry level server usage at this price at the moment. The AMD EPYC platform and CPUs are too expensive and at too lower clock speeds for a lot of business applications requiring quick response times/low latency and or licensing per core. And while AMD Ryzen CPUs are great for desktops, particularly where a dedicated GPU was already going to be required, this is actually one area where the Intel solutions can often end up cheaper and better when factoring platform costs - while also having far better support and availability. Therefore, it's really just Intel competing with themselves at the moment and enticing businesses to upgrade/invest. While not hopeful, it would be great if AMD and partners could change this.
Given that an 8700k in one of my desktops is already quicker than a lot of the 12 to 16 core Intel Xeon-SP configurations that we've also used, even for heavy load tests, due to frequency, latency, and IPC benefits, I'm really looking forward to these CPUs, and the 8 core version, hitting the market. Just the saving in per core licensing costs would probably make it cheaper to buy new servers with these CPUs than to configure new VMs on existing Xeon-SP servers for new setups.
Cooe - Tuesday, November 6, 2018 - link
Uhh... You seem to have entirely forgotten that X399 & Ryzen Threadripper exist. Plenty good single-core performance, but absolutely barnstorming multi-core for the price, ECC support, AND 64x PCIe 3.0 lanes.CallumS - Tuesday, November 6, 2018 - link
Agreed about Ryzen Threadripper CPUs being great for multi-threaded workloads and also having pretty good single core performance. I didn't forget, it's what will likely be in my next workstation, I just didn't go into that detail for the purpose of brevity.For production server purposes, atleast a basic remote management interface and support from the major vendors is generally required, though. If we could get a Ryzen Threadripper 2950X or equivalent EPYC CPU with similar frequencies in a 1RU chasis from a major vendor with decent support and management interfaces at a good price, we'd be all over it. Perhaps with the new Zen 2 EPYC CPUs about to be announced, AMD will offer something like it. I certainly hope so.
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 6, 2018 - link
It has nothing to do with what AMD are offering, unfortunately, and everything to do with what system integrators are prepared to put out there. As long as Intel is filling their pockets with plenty of MDF then I wouldn't expect to see anything soon. Hell, HP even took the iLO out of their MicroServer when they switched back to using AMD CPUs because "reasons".CallumS - Tuesday, November 6, 2018 - link
I think that it's far more likely to be a combination. System integrators still require support from manufacturers/vendors for the products/solutions that they are selling. And both AMD and Intel definitely put in mechanisms/differences to protect product lines/profit. It's not like the major vendors aren't selling EPYC systems now. A new EPYC SKU by AMD with 2950X like performance would in itself provide us with the option for a higher frequency server/EPYC CPU. Given the TDP of the Epyc 7601, it should be quite easy and practical to do from engineering and manufacturing perspectives. Or, alternatively, it should be easy enough for AMD to provide capabilities for, and to encourage, board partners to release 'server' orientated Threadripper boards. Either of which I'd love to see - but would still much prefer higher frequency EPYC SKUs due to memory and platform advantages - particularly with major system integrators already having validated EPYC server platforms.Dusk_Star - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link
Corsair Ballistix4x4GB
DDR4-2666
I feel like this should be *Crucial Ballistix* to match the rest of the "Test Setup" table.
watersb - Tuesday, November 6, 2018 - link
Awesome review, many thanks.I usually build my systems with ECC DRAM, whenever possible, but that has become a huge pain point over the past few generations.
I prefer to hear the news on these parts from AnandTech. ServeTheHome is fantastic, but nothing but $10,000+ systems gets a bit discouraging.
mkaibear - Tuesday, November 6, 2018 - link
Can I just say how much the header text (EEEEEEEE) made me laugh?Not sure why, think it just appealed to my inner surrealist.
Cheers!
CyrIng - Thursday, November 8, 2018 - link
Nice review and thanks for the Chromium results but those are professional processors which to my pov will also be employed in Linux/BSD/database/backend frameworks and so on where games don't really matter.For example, x86 and arm cross compilations such as buildroot would be great to read.
As an engineer Windows is out of the scope