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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JohanAnandtech - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
I don't see the error. "Beckton" (Nehalem-EX, X7560) is at 2.4 GHzmslasm - Sunday, February 23, 2014 - link
> I don't see the error.The article says "The Opteron core is also better than most people think: at 2.4GHz it would deliver about 2481 MIPs." - but, according to the graph, Opteron already delivers 2723 @ 2.3Ghz. So it is puzzling to see that it "would" deliver less MIPS (2481 vs 2723) at higher frequency (2.4 vs 2.3 Ghz) (regardless of any Intel results/frequencies)
silverblue - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link
It's entirely possible that the score is down to the 6376's 3.2GHz turbo mode.plext0r - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
Would be nice to run benchmarks against a Quad E5-4650 system for comparison.blaktron - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
... you know you can't, right?blaktron - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
Nevermind, read v2 there where you didn't write it. Too much coffee....usernametaken76 - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
For the more typo-sensitive reader (perhaps both technically astute and typo-senstive):"A question like "Does the SPARC T5 also support both single-threaded and multi-threaded applications?" must sound particularly hilarious to the our technically astute readers."
...to the our...
JohanAnandtech - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
Fixed. Thx!TiGr1982 - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
From the conclusion:"The Xeon E7 v2 chips are slated to remain in data centers for the next several years as the most robust—and most expensive—offerings from Intel."
I don't think it will be really "several" years - maybe 1-2 years later this Ivy Bridge-EX-based E7 v2 will probably be superseded by Haswell-EX-based E7 v3 with Haswell cores with AVX2/FMA, which should make a difference in pro floating point calculations and data processing, and working with DDR4.
Kevin G - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
The Ivy Bridge-EX -> Haswell-EX transition will mimic the Nehalem-EX -> Westere-EX transition in that the core systems provided by the big OEM will stay the same. The OEM's offer Haswell-EX as a drop in replacement to their existing socket 2011v1 systems. Haswell-EX -> Broadwell-EX will again be using the same socket and follow a similarly quick transition. SkyLake-EX will bring a new socket design (perhaps with some optical interconnects?).At some point Intel will offer new memory buffer chips to support DDR4. This will likely require a system to swap out all the memory daughter cards but the motherboard from big OEM's shouldn't change. There may also be a period where these large systems can be initially configured with either DDR3 or DDR4 based upon customer requests.