Westmere-EX: Intel's Flagship Benchmarked
by Johan De Gelas on May 19, 2011 1:30 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Intel
- Xeon
- Cloud Computing
- Westmere-EX
Real-World Power
In the real world you do not run your virtualized servers at their maximum load just to measure the potential performance, but neither do they run idle. The user base will create a certain workload and expect this workload to be performed with the lowest response times. We created a real world “equal load” scenario as we described here.
The numbers above show that there is more to energy consumption than just measuring idle and full load. The quad Xeon needs 67% more energy to run the same workload. Granted, our methodology favors the Opteron a bit: the average CPU load is around 5-30% for the 80 thread Xeon E7, while the Opteron is running at an average of 10-40%. So the load on the Xeon E7 is a bit too low. Still, the real problem is that the Xeon E7 power consumption is high at low loads.
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extide - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
When you spend $100,000 + on the S/W running on it, the HW costs don't matter. Recently I was in a board meeting for launching a new website that the company I work for is going to be running. These guys don't know/care about these detailed specs/etc. They simply said, "Cost doesn't matter just get whatever is the fastest."alpha754293 - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
Can you run the Fluent and LS-DYNA benchmarks on the system please? Thanks.mosu - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
A good presentation with onest conclusions, I like this one.ProDigit - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
What if you would compare it to 2x corei7 desktops, running Linux and free server software, what keeps companies from doing that?Orwell - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
Most probably the lack of support for more than about 48GiB of RAM, the lack of ECC in the case of Intel and the lack of multisocket-support, just to name a few.ganjha - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
There is always the option of clusters...L. - Friday, May 20, 2011 - link
Err... like you're going to go cheap for the CPU and then put everything on infiniband --DanNeely - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
Many of the uses for this class of server involve software that won't scale across multiple boxes due to network latency, or monolithic design. The VM farm test was one example that would; but the lack of features like ECC support would preclude it from consideration by 99% of the buyers of godbox servers.erple2 - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
I think that more and more people are realizing that the issue is more about lack of scaling linearly than anything like ECC. Buying a bullet proof server is turning out to cost way too much money (I mean ACTUALLY bullet proof, not "so far, this server has been rock solid for me").I read an interesting article about "design for failure" (note, NOT the same thing as "design to fail") by Jeff Atwood the other day, and it really opened my eyes. Each extra 9 in 99.99% uptime starts costing exponentially more money. That kind of begs the question, should you be investing more money into a server that shouldn't fail, or should you be investigating why your software is so fragile as to not be able to accommodate a hardware failure?
I dunno. Designing and developing software that can work around hardware failures is a very difficult thing to do.
L. - Thursday, May 19, 2011 - link
Well ./ obvious.Who has a fton of servers ? Google
How do they manage availability ?
So much redundancy that resilience is implicit and "reduced service" isn't even all that reduced.
And no designing / dev s/w that works around h/w failures is not that hard at all, and it is in fact quite common (load balancing, active/passive stuff, virtualization helps too etc.).