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
Measuring Real-World Power Consumption
The Equal Workload (EWL) version of vApus FOS is very similar to our previous vApus Mark II "Real-world Power" test. To create a real-world “equal workload” scenario, we throttle the number of users in each VM to a point where you typically get somewhere between 20% and 80% CPU load on a modern dual CPU server. The amount of requests is the same for each system, hence "equal workload". The CPU load is typically around 30-50%, with peaks up to 65% (for more info see here). At the end of the test, we get to a low 10%, which is ideal for the machine to boost to higher CPU clocks (Turbo) and race to idle.
We used the "Balanced" power policy and enabled C-states as the current ESXi settings make poor use of the C6 capabilities of the latest Opterons and Xeons.
First let's check out the response times.
| vApus FOS Response times (ms) | ||||||||
| CPU | PhpBB1 | PHPBB2 | MySQL OLAP | Zimbra | ||||
| AMD Opteron 6276 | 101 | 30 | 3.8 | 41 | ||||
| AMD Opteron 6174 | 118 | 41 | 3.8 | 45 | ||||
| Intel Xeon X5650 | 45 | 18 | 2.4 | 29 | ||||
| Intel Xeon E5-2660 | 41 | 18 | 2.5 | 25 | ||||
| Intel Xeon E5-2690 | 27 | 14 | 2.3 | 23 | ||||
It's worth noting that enabling the C-states in ESXi improves the performance/watt ratio of the Opteron 6276 quite a bit. Not only is the power consumption lower (see below), but enabling C6 allows higher turbo clocks, which in turn benefits response times. Compared to our previous test (standard out of the box "Balanced") all response times improve by 10% except for MySQL (which is already very low).
Even with that improvement however it is not enough to beat the Xeon E5. The Xeon E5 delivers extremely low response times....
... while sipping very little power, despite being run inside a feature rich server. Kudos to Intel for a job very well done.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
81 Comments
View All Comments
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.
famalosa - Tuesday, April 26, 2016 - link
Les deux platines ci-dessus commençons par lance Gobelins ou la bombe tour/Canon au début de la bataille lorsque la barre de l'élixir obtient autour de 10. Je vais tout d'abord si l'ennemi a au compteur et ils ont habitude de laisser tomber tout d'abord une grosse carte ou utilisez les flèches. Puis jouer à votre avantage avec le coût de l'élixir, troupes pour la défense et une attaque forte. Déposer le Canon ou la tour au milieu de rerouter les agresseurs et pour la défense.<a href="http://clashroyalhack.fr/">CR hack</a>
famalosa - Tuesday, April 26, 2016 - link
Le pont sur la gauche est une mise en page « plus grand risque de mieux récompenser », tandis que celui de droite est un jeu plus lent que prendra de temps et patience pour gagner. Tous deux sont extrêmement compétents et me laisser pousser à Arena 7.http://clashroyalhack.fr/