Intel's Xeon E5-2600 V2: 12-core Ivy Bridge EP for Servers
by Johan De Gelas on September 17, 2013 12:00 AM ESTConclusions
Intel has again done a remarkably good job with the Xeon "Ivy Bridge EP". Adding more cores can easily lead to bad scaling or even to situations where performance decreases. The new Xeon E5 adds about 30% performance across the line, in more or less the same power envelope. Single-threaded performance does not suffer either (though it also fails to improve in most scenarios). Even better, Intel's newest CPU works inside the same socket as its predecessor. That's no small feat, as there have been changes in core count and uncore, and as a result the electrical characteristics change too.
At the end of last year, AMD was capable of mounting an attack on the midrange Xeons by introducing Opterons based on the "Piledriver" core. That core improved both performance and power consumption, and Opteron servers were tangibly cheaper. However, at the moment, AMD's Opteron is forced to leave the midrange market and is relegated to the budget market. Price cuts will once again be necessary.
Considering AMD's "transformed" technology strategy , we cannot help but be pessimistic about AMD's role in the midrange and high-end x86 server market. AMD's next step is nothing more than a somewhat tweaked "Opteron 6300". Besides the micro server market, only the Berlin CPU (4x Steamroller, integrated GPU) might be able to turn some heads in HPC and give Intel some competition in that space. Time will tell.
In other words, Intel does not have any competition whatsoever in the midrange and high-end x86 server market. The best Xeons are now about 20% more expensive, but that price increase is not tangible in most markets. The customers buying servers for ERP, OLTP and virtualization will not feel this, as a few hundred dollars more (or even a couple thousand) for the CPUs pales in comparison to the yearly software licenses. The HPC people will be less happy but many of them are spending their money on stream processors like the Xeon Phi, AMD Firestream, or NVIDIA Tesla. Even in the HPC market, the percentage of the budget spent on CPUs is decreasing.
Luckily, Intel still has to convince people that upgrading is well worth the trouble. As a result you get about 25% more multi-threaded/server performance, about 5-10% higher single-threaded performance (a small IPC boost and a 100MHz speed bump), and sligthly lower power consumption for the same price. It may not be enough for some IT departments, but those that need more performance within the same power envelope will probably find a lot to like with the new Xeons.
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ShieTar - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Oops, you are perfectly right of course. In that case the 4960X actually gets the slightly better efficiency (12.08 is 0.28 per thread and GHz) than the dual 2697s (33.56 is 0.26 per thread and GHz), which makes perfect sense.It also indicates the 4960X gets about 70% of the performance of a single 2697 at 38% of the cost. Then again, a 1270v3 gets you 50% of the performance at 10% of the price. So when talking farms (i.e. more than one system cooperating), four single-socket boards with 1270v3 will get you almost the power of a dual-socket board with 2697v2 (minus communication overhead), will likely use similar power demand (plus communication overhead), and save you $4400 in the process. Since you use 32 instead of 48 threads, but 4 installations instead of 1, software licensing cost may vary strongly in either direction.
Would be interesting to see this tested. Anybody willing to send AT four single-socket workstations?
hpvd - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
yes - this would be really interesting. But you should use Infiniband interconnect for a good scaling. And this could only be done without an expensive IB-Switch with 3-maschines...DanNeely - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Won't the much higher price of a 4 socket board kill any CPU cost savings?In any event, the 1270v3 is a unisocket chip so you'd need to do 4 boxes to cluster.
Poking around on Intel's site it looks like all 1xxx Xeons are uniprocessor, 2xxx is dual socket, 4xxx quad, 8xxx octo socket. But the 4xxx series is still on 2012 models and 8xxx on 2011 releases. The 4 way chips could just be a bit behind the 2way ones being reviewed now; but with the 8 way ones not updated in 2 years I'm wondering if they're being stealth discontinued due to minimal cases where 2 smaller servers aren't a better buy.
hpvd - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
I think we are talking around about 4 systems with each one cpu, one mainboard, RAM, ..+ network interface cardhpvd - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
another advantage would be that these CPUs uses the latest Hashwell Achitecture: some workloads would greatly benefit from it's AVX2 ...Kevin G - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
I'd fathom the bigger benefit of Haswell is found in the TSX and L4 cache for server workloads. The benefits of AVX2 would be exploited in more HPC centric workloads. Now if Intel would just release a socketed 1200v3 series CPU with L4 cache.MrSpadge - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
> Now if Intel would just release a socketed 1200v3 series CPU with L4 cache.Agreed! And someone would test it at server loads. And BOINC. And if only Intel would release an overclockalbe Haswell with L4 which we can actually buy!
ShieTar - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
A 4 socket board is expensive, but thats not the discussion I was making. A Xeon E5-4xxx is not likely to be less expensive than the E5-2xxx part anyways.The question was specifically how four single socket boards (with 4 cores each, at 3.5GHz, and Haswell technology) would position themselves against a dual-socket board with 24 cores at 2.7GHz and Ivy Bridge EP tech. Admittedly, the 3 extra boards will add a bit of cost (~500$), and and extra memory & communications cards, etc. can also add something depending on usage scenario. Then again, a single 4-core might get the work done with less than half the memory of a 12-core, so you might safe a little there as well.
psyq321 - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
E5-46xx v2 is coming in few months, qualification samples are already available and for all intents and purposes it is ready - Intel just needs to ramp-up production.E7-88xx v2 is coming in Q1 2014, it is definitely not discontinued, and the platform (Brickland) will be compatible with both Ivy Bridge EX (E7-88xx v2 among others) and Haswell EX (E7-88xx v3 among others) CPUs and will also be able to take DDR4 RAM. It will require different LGA 2011 socket, though.
EX platform will come with up to 15 cores in Ivy Bridge EX generation.
Kevin G - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
The E5-46xxx is simply a rebranded E5-26xx with official support for quad socket. The dies are the going to be the same between both families. Intel is just doing extra validation for the quad socket market as the market tends to favor more reliability features as socket count goes up.While not socket compatible, Brickland as a platform is expected to be used for the next (last?) Itanium chips.