The Intel Xeon E7 v2 Review: Quad Socket, Up to 60 Cores/120 Threads

Our Benchmark Choices

To make the comparison more interesting, we decided to include both the Quad Xeon "Westmere-EX" as well as the "Nehalem-EX". Remember these heavy duty, high RAS servers continue to be used for much longer in the data center than their dual socket counterparts. Many people considering the newest Xeon E7-4800 v2 probably still own a Xeon X7500.

Of course, the comparison would not be complete without the latest dual Xeon 2600 v2 server and at least one Opteron based server. Due to the large number of platforms and the fact that we developed a brand new HPC test (see further), we quickly ran out of time. These time constrains and the fact that we have neglected our Linux testing in recent reviews in favor of Windows 2012 and ESXi led to the decision to limit ourself to testing on top of Ubuntu Linux 13.10 (kernel 3.11). You'll see our typical ESXi and Windows benchmarks in a later review.

Benchmark Configuration

There are some differences in the RAM and SSD configurations. The use of different SSDs was due to time constraints as we wanted to test the servers as much as possible in parallel. The RAM configuration differences are a result of the platforms: for example, the quad Intel CPUs only perform at their best when each CPU gets eight DIMMs. The Opteron and Dual Xeon E5-2680 v2 server perform best with one DIMM per channel (1 DPC).

None of these differences have a tangible influence on the results of our benchmarks, as none of them were bottlenecked by the storage system or the amount of RAM that was used. The minimum amount of 64GB of RAM was more than enough for all benchmarks in this review.

We also did not attempt to do power measurements. We will try to do an apples-to-apples power comparison at a later time.

Intel S4TR1SY3Q "Brickland" IVT-EX 4U-server

The latest and greatest from Intel consists of the following components:

Total amount of DIMM slots is 96. When using 64GB LRDIMMs, this server can offer up to 6TB of RAM! In some cases, we have tested the E7-4890 v2 at a lower maximum clock in order to do clock-for-clock comparisons with the previous generation, and in a few cases we have also disabled three of the cores in order to simulate performance of some of the 12-core Ivy Bridge EX parts. For example, a E7-4890 v2 at 2.8 GHz with 3 cores disabled (12 cores total) gives you a good idea how the much less expensive E7- 8857 v2 at 3 GHz would perform: it would perform about 7% higher than the 12-core E7-4890 v2.

Intel Quanta QSCC-4R Benchmark Configuration

The previous quad Xeon E7 server, as reviewed here.

The server can accept up to 64 32GB Load Reduced DIMMs (LR-DIMMs) or 2TB.

Intel's Xeon E5 server R2208GZ4GSSPP (2U Chassis)

This is the server we used in our Xeon "Ivy bridge EP" review.

The Xeon E5 CPUs have four memory channels per CPU and support up to DDR3-1866, and thus our dual CPU configuration gets eight DIMMs for maximum bandwidth.

Supermicro A+ Opteron server 1022G-URG (1U Chassis)

This Opteron server is not comparable in any way with the featured Intel systems as it is not targeted at the same market and costs a fraction of the other machines. Nevertheless, here's our test configuration.

The Opteron server in this review is only here to satisfy curiosity. We want to see how well the Opteron fares in our new Linux benchmarks.