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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
70 Comments
View All Comments
psyq321 - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Yep, EP-46xx v2 will use the same C1 stepping (for HCC SKUs) for production parts as 2P Xeons, but there will be some features enabled in microcode which did not make it in the 26xx SKUs.EX is already on D1 stepping for QS, as the validation cycle for EX is more strict due to more RAS features etc.
Casper42 - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
So I work for HP and your comments about 4x1P instead of 2x2P make me wonder if you have been sneaking around our ProLiant development lab in Houston.I was there 6 weeks ago and a decent sized cluster of 1P nodes was being assembled on an as yet unannounced HP platform. I was told the early/beta customer it was for had done some testing and found for their particular HPC app, they were in fact getting measurably better overall performance.
The interesting thing about this design was they put 2 x 1P nodes on a single PCB (Motherboard) in order to more easily adapt the 1P nodes to a system largely designed with 2P space requirements in mind.
Pretty sure the chips were Haswell based as well but can't recall for sure.
André - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Would be nice to see benchmarks for OS X, considering this thing is going inside the new Mac Pro.Final Cut X, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve etc.
I believe the 2660v2 hits the sweet spot with it's 10 cores.
DanNeely - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
That'd require Apple giving Anandtech a new Mac Pro to run benchmarks on...Kevin G - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Now that Intel has officially launched the new Xeons, the new Mac Pro can't be far behind.wallysb01 - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Well, you could run the CPU benchmarks just fine. But not the GPU ones.Simon G - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Typo in Conclusion section . . . " Thta's no small feat, . . ."garadante - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
There's a minor error on the Cinebench single-threaded graph. It has the clock speed for the E5-2697 v2 as 2.9 instead of 2.7, as it should be. Which is semi confusing on that graph as it explains the lower single-threaded performance from the E5-2690.SanX - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
This forum has most obsolete comments design of pre-Neanderthals times, no Edit, no Delete, no look at previous user comments. Effin shameMrSpadge - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
You mixed up forum and article comments.