The Xeon E5-2600: Dual Sandy Bridge for Servers
by Johan De Gelas on March 6, 2012 9:27 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Virtualization
- Xeon
- Opteron
- Cloud Computing
Rendering: Blender 2.6.0
Blender is a very popular open source renderer with a large and active community. We tested the 64-bit Windows edition, using version 2.6.0a. If you like, you can perform this benchmark very easily too. We used the metallic robot, a scene with rather complex lighting (reflections) and raytracing. Furthermore to make the benchmark more repetitive, we changed the following parameters:
- The resolution was set to 2560x1600
- Antialiasing was set to 16
- We disabled compositing in post processing
- Tiles were set to 16x16 (X=16, Y=16)
- Threads was set to auto (one thread per CPU is set).
As we have explained, the current 24 and 32 core CPUs benefit from using a much larger number of tiles than we have previously used (64, 8x8). That is why we raised the number of tiles to 256 (16x16), though all CPUs perform better at this setting.
To make the results easier to read, we again converted the reported render time into images rendered per hour, so higher is better.
Blender is Xeon territory for sure, as Blender mostly runs in the L1 and L2 cache. Therefore a E5-2630 (2.3 GHz, 15 MB L3, $612) will probably perform about 4% faster than the six-core Xeon E5-2660 in this test. Our six-core Xeon E5-2660 is about 26% faster than the best Opteron. We estimate that the Xeon E5-2630 will offer more or less the same performance at an almost 30% lower pricepoint than the Opteron 6276. Whether you have a lot or little to spend, the Xeon E5 is your best bet for Blender.
Rendering Performance: 3DSMax 2012
As requested, we're reintroducing our 3DS Max benchmark. We used the "architecture" scene which is included in the SPEC APC 3DS Max test. As the Scanline renderer is limited to 16 threads, we're using the iray render engine, which is basically an self-configuring Mental Ray render engine.
We rendered at 720p (1280x720) resolution. We measured the time it takes to render 10 frames (from 20 to 29) with SSE enabled. We recorded the time and then calculated (3600 seconds * 10 frames / time recorded) how many frames a certain CPU configuration could render in one hour. All results are reported as rendered images per hour; higher is thus better. We used the 64-bit version of 3ds Max 2008 on 64-bit Windows 2008 R2 SP1.
Even with the advanced iray renderer, 3DS Max rendering reaches our scaling limits. The 32-thread Xeons do not come close to 100% CPU load (more like 90%) and in between the frames there are small periods of single threaded processing. Amdahl's law is most likely reason here. We suspect that highly clocked lower core count models can pass the 53 fps barrier we're seeing here.
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silverblue - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
You've put that Interlagos has 4x2MB L2, but that would only be true for Valencia; Interlagos is 8x2MB.aranyagag - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
you forgot the E5-2687W with a 150w tdp and higher speedscolonelclaw - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Hi There,Thanks for an excellent article. With regards to the rendering benchmarks, would you consider using VRay as a rendering engine? It's fast becoming industry standard, is compatible with all the big hitters (Max, Maya, Softimage etc), is cross platform, and I believe, is incredibly well coded to scale with cores.
It's also incredibly popular, not something you could say about iRay right now.
Slik - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
Would be nice if some game benchmark was included as well.colonelclaw - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - link
Bloody hell those chips look good, and don't Intel know it; those prices make me wince.Having waited what seems like forever, I was thrilled to see the Xeon E5s finally available, right up until I did some quick maths and figured out that for my business to buy a new 2U Twin squared rendernode with 16/32 cores per node will cost us around £10,000. Still the thing is, now that those chips are available, next time we buy kit we can't afford not to choose them.
Skouperd - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
Great article... but can it run crysis?Seriously, what will happen if you plug in some high end graphics card in that machine, how will that compare from a gaming perspeective to say an LGA2011 cpu?
;-)
fudd101 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
From the 'article' .....'The Opteron might also have a role in the low end, price sensitive HPC market, where it still performs very well. It won't have much of chance in the high end clustered one as Intel has the faster and more power efficient PCIe interface'
Well, if that's the case, why exactly would AMD be scoring so many design wins with Interlagos. Including this one ...
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394515,00.as...
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Cray-Ti...
U think those guys at Cray were going for low performance ? In fact, seems like AMD has being rather cleaning up in the HPC market since the arrival of Interlagos. And the markets have picked up on it, AMD stock is thru the roof since the start of the year. Or just see how many Intel processors occupy the the top 10 supercomputers on the planet. Nuff said ...
jaskhoo - Wednesday, July 11, 2012 - link
Hi, abit blur here and would like to know if there's anyone who could enlighten abit.I'm looking to purchase a new server to work with an SQL 2012 4 core, the initial ppreference was for an E5620 which is now an outdated model but I can't go for higher E5-xxx models as all are 6 core and will affect the 4 core SQL licensing. I'm not running a huge databse but would like to know if there are any serious performance difference between the two processor. Appreciate it.
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