The Intel Xeon E7 v2 Review: Quad Socket, Up to 60 Cores/120 Threads
by Johan De Gelas on February 21, 2014 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Intel
- Xeon
- Ivy Bridge EX
- server
- Brickland
Power consumption
By the virtue of the impressive 22nm Hi-K metal-gate tri-gate 22nm CMOS with 9 metal layers, Intel has been able to increase the maximum core count by 50% (15 vs 10) and the clockspeed by 17% (2.8GHz vs 2.4GHz) while the TDP has only increased by 19% (155W vs 130W). Intel claims that the actual power usage of the new flagship E7, the 155W 4890 v2, is actually lower than the previous 130W TDP Xeon E7-4870 at low and medium loads.
At maximum load, Intel claims you get about 50% higher power consumption for twice as much performance. At idle and low loads, it seems that the 155W Xeon 4890 v2 is a lot more efficient. That makes sense considering the improvements in idle/low load power use we saw with Sandy Bridge and then Ivy Bridge over the earlier Nehalem/Clarksfield offerings on desktops and laptops; it's taken some time, but the big servers are finally seeing the same improvements with Ivy Bridge EX.
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Kevin G - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
And a quick addition:There will indeed be a quick adoption to Haswell-EX not because of AVX2 or DDR4 but rather transactional memory support (TSX). For the large databases and applications these systems are targeted at, TSX should prove to be helpful.
TiGr1982 - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
I agree, TSX should make a lot of sense for these E7's - they have a huge core count and huge shared memory at the same time.Schmide - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
I think your L3 latency numbers are off. I think typical Intel L3 latencies are 30-40 clocks ~3-4ns.Schmide - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
Oops my bad i miss used the calculator. Ignore.dylan522p - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
No power consumption numbers?JohanAnandtech - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link
Coming...we had to run lots of test in parallel, so it was not possible to make sure all systems were similar. Also we should test with workloads that require a lot more memory to get an idea.mslasm - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
Note that E7-8857 v2 has 12 cores but no HT, so only has 12 threads as well (see http://ark.intel.com/products/75254/Intel-Xeon-Pro... Thus it is not equivalent to a 3Ghz E7-4860V2, as 4860 has HT for a total of 24 threadsAlso, there must be a typo either in the graph or in the text on the "single thread" integer performance test: "Opteron ... at 2.4GHz would deliver about 2481 MIPs", while - according to the graph - it already delivers 2636 @ 2.3Ghz.
JohanAnandtech - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link
Good point. There is little gain from HT in OpenFoam, but it will influence the LZMA benchmarks. So the Openfoam findings are still valid, but not the LZMA. The kernel compile is somewhat in between.JohanAnandtech - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link
I will rerun the benchmarks without HT to check.mslasm - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link
Thanks! I did not mean to imply HT matters "a lot", but it may influence some (and I admit I don't know much about how your benchmarks behave, other than parallel LZMA which I worked a lot with) - so it just does not sound right to outright call it equivalent, and I wish AT only has statements anyone can just trust :)