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
The Core
As Ian already discussed, the new Xeon E7 v2 is a 6, 8, 10, 12 or 15-core Ivy Bridge Xeon, similar to the Xeon E5-2600 v2. The big difference of course is that this new Xeon E7 v2 can be plugged into a quad- or native octal-socket server. These processors have three QuickPath Interconnects to be able to communicate over one hop. More sockets are possible with third party "glue logic".
Compared to the old Xeon E7 based on the "Westmere" core, the new Xeon E7 v2 "Ivy Bridge EX" features a vast amount of improvements. We will not list all of them, but just to give you an idea of how much progress has been made since the Westmere core:
- µop cache (less decoding)
- Improved branch prediction
- Deeper and larger OoO buffers
- Turbo Boost 2.0
- AVX instructions
- Divider is twice as fast
- MOVs take no execution slots
- Improved prefetchers
- Improved shift/rotate and split/load
- Better balance between Hyper-Threading and single-threaded performance; buffers are dynamically allocated to threads
- Faster memory controller
Most of the improvement were fine tuning but the combined effect of them should result in a tangible performance boost in integer performance. For software that uses AVX, the performance boost could be very substantial. Even in software that uses older SSE(2) code, we found that the Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge generations were 20% faster, clock for clock, and we should see similar results here.
The Uncore
Just like the Xeon E5-2600 v2, the Ivy Bridge EX cores and 2.5MB L3 cache slices are stacked in columns connected with three fast rings, which connect all cores and all other the units (called agents) on the SoC. These rings also make sure that the L3 slices can act as one unified 37.5MB L3 cache with 450GB/s of bandwidth. The latency to the L3 cache is very low: 15.5ns (at 2.8GHz) versus 20ns for Westmere-EX (Xeon E7-4780 at 2.4GHz). PCIe I/O now happens on the die as well, and each CPU can support 32 PCIe lanes.
Finally, some coherency improvements are also implemented. Modified cache lines are send straight to the requester, without any write back to the memory agent. Overall, the collective sum of the improvement should prove quite capable.
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TiGr1982 - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
I think, 6 cores on desktop for $300 will NOT happen this year.Because if it will, then you'll get $300 4 core i7 on mainstream 1150 & $300 6 core i7 on new 2011 simultaneously on the market.
To adjust this, they'll have to sell 1150 4 core i7 for $200-$220, like Core i5 now.
This is not realistic, because that's Intel we're talking about, right?...
dragonsqrrl - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
That's actually the plan, except it won't be $300. I think the latest leaks suggest that the lowest end Haswell-E SKU will be a 6-core K series at ~$400. The other two price points remain about the same, $600 and $1000 for the 8-core SKU's.TiGr1982 - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link
To me, seems too good to be true. Will require a major change of mindset inside Intel to start selling 6 core for $400 and lower 8 core for $600 :)(while 8 core XE for $1000 is not surprising at all)
Harry Lloyd - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link
The thing is LGA2011 mobos are really expensive, so the CPU price does not have to be that high. You can get a good B85 mobo even for less than 100 $, and an LGA2011 mobos start at 250 or even 300 $.I would not pay 300 $ for a mobo, and 400 $ for a 6-core CPU, that would still be ridiculous. I hate this stagnation. The transision from 1-core to 4-core happend really quickly.
MrSpadge - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link
The smallest 6-core K model has been around 500$ for quite some time, so I see no problem going to 400$ this time. 8 cores for 600$ would indeed be a significant step for some, though.psyq321 - Monday, March 10, 2014 - link
Well, if Intel manages to castrate the HEDT "E" version enough so that it does not pose any threat to their Xeon revenue, price drop might happen.However, one factor not to be underestimated is total available market and how much are target consumers for this kind of hardware willing to pay. I have no data, but for some reason I think only small % of "power users" (>very< power users) need 8 cores today and they would probably be willing to shell out $1000.
Thing is, if you are Intel, you will probably making the calculation: what if we drop the price to, say, $600? Is this going to bring us more customers? Is this going to cannibalize some of, more lucrative, Xeon market?
I suppose if Intel fuses out TSX, VT-D, ECC memory support and, of course, QPI (which is what they do anyway with Sandy-E and Ivy-E HEDT CPUs) the chip would practically be next to useless to most Xeon customers. So the remaining issue is the market.
f0d - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
i agreei was hoping for 8 core ivy bridge-e chips but had to settle for 6 cores which i can easily use all of
i do a LOT of video encoding using handbrake and that program just loves cores, i easily saturate all 12 threads with my settings in handbrake so i do believe it could use a single socket 8 core well (i have read tests that show handbrake not liking dual/quad socket systems for more cores - but does improve when using lots of cores on a single socket)
MT007 - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
You have a error on page 8, in your fourth paragraph you have the opteron as 2.4ghz and only with a score of 2481. From your graph it should have been 2.3ghz and 2723?webmastir - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
They don't tend to fix errors/read comments I don't think.JohanAnandtech - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
Sure we do :-)