Intel SSD DC P3700 Review: The PCIe SSD Transition Begins with NVMe
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 3, 2014 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Intel
- Intel SSD DC P3700
- NVMe
CPU Utilization
With the move to NVMe not only do we get lower latency IOs but we should also see lower CPU utilization thanks to the lower overhead protocol. To quantify the effects I used task manager to monitor CPU utilization across all four cores in a Core i7 4770K system (with HT disabled). Note that these values don't just look at the impact of the storage device, but also the CPU time required to generate the 4KB random read (QD128) workload. I created four QD32 threads so all cores are taxed and we're not limited by a single CPU core.
To really put these values in perspective though we need to take into account performance as well. The chart below divides total IOPS during this test by total CPU usage to give us IOPS/% CPU usage:
Here all of the PCIe solutions do pretty well. The SATA based S3700 is put to shame but even the Intel SSD 910 does well here.
For the next charts I'm removing Iometer from the CPU usage calculation and instead looking at the CPU usage from the rest of the software stack:
Here the 910 looks very good, it's obviously a much older (and slower) drive but it's remarkably CPU efficient. Micron's P420m doesn't look quite as good, and the SATA S3700 is certainly far less efficient when it comes to IOPS/CPU.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
85 Comments
View All Comments
Ammaross - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
The M.2 SATA-protocol-on-PCIe drives? A comparison would mean Apple would need have to have support for NVMe first or the ability to even slot in such a card (rules out the 3 offerings you outlined).extide - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
What are you talking about? "The M.2 SATA-protocol-on-PCIe drives?" doesn't even make sense.All you need to do to compare them is run the benchmarks on the apple hardware, possibly while running under a windows OS. OR, if the drives use the regular m.2 style connector you could just stick them in a desktop. The fact they run AHCI over PCIe does not make a comparison impossible, in fact all of the other PCIe cards in this review that were benchmarked against were also AHCI based cards. Seems like NVMe is confusing people at lot more than it should.
Galatian - Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - link
I think he tried to say that you can't stick one of those new NVMe drives into a Mac, since OS X does not yet support NVMe.That being said, Apple discontinued the old Mac Pro where you could put a PCIe device inside, so the point is moot no matter what.
gospadin - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
I'd have liked to see the drive in 25W mode tooextide - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
Yeah, I would as well. I am assuming the 25W mode has specific cooling requirements? More info on this would be nice. Also what is the default TDP?eanazag - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
That's also the first thing I thought. I wanted to see the boost level. That bottom is pretty close to where I would consider splurging for my desktop with a 400GB. If you consider a RAID card and few drives then $600 is justifiable.I stayed away from the PCIe SSDs because of boot issues and quality concerns. A lot of those were OCZ.
Galatian - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
I might have just overlooked it, but I guess those drives are not bootable?457R4LDR34DKN07 - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
" Booting to NVMe drives shouldn't be an issue either."Galatian - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
Ah great...so this might be a nice alternative to the lackluster state M.2 is right now after all!dopp - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
NVMe won't necessarily be a replacement for M.2. M.2 is just the connector, and the M.2 standard supports both SATA and NVMe as protocols to control the SSD. That said, you need a motherboard that's wired to give PCIe-over-M.2 as well as a drive that supports NVMe, and NVMe M.2 drives will likely be much better than SATA ones.