X-Gene 1, Atom C2000 and Xeon E3: Exploring the Scale-Out Server World
by Johan De Gelas on March 9, 2015 2:00 PM ESTBenchmark Configuration
All tests were done on Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS. We tested the HP Moonshot remotely. Our special thanks goes out to the team of HP EMEA Moonshot Discovery Lab of Grenoble (France). We tested both the Supermicro MicroCloud and the different motherboard configurations in our lab.
ASRock's C2750D4I
| CPU | Intel Atom C2750 |
| RAM | 4x 8GB DDR3 @1600 or 4x 16GB DDR3 @1333 (Intelligent Memory) |
| Internal Disks | 1x Intel MLC SSD710 200GB |
| Motherboard | ASRock C2750D4I |
| PSU | Supermicro PWS-502 (80+) |
Intel's Xeon E3-1200 v3 – ASUS P9D-MH
| CPU | Intel Xeon processor E3-1240 v3 Intel Xeon processor E3-1230L v3 |
| RAM | 4x 8GB DDR3 @1600 |
| Internal Disks | 1x Intel MLC SSD710 200GB |
| Motherboard | ASUS P9D-MH |
| PSU | Supermicro PWS-502 (80+) |
Intel's Xeon E3-1200 v2
| CPU | Intel Xeon processor E3-1220 v2 Intel Xeon processor E3-1265L v2 |
| RAM | 4x 8GB DDR3 @1600 |
| Internal Disks | 1x Intel MLC SSD710 200GB |
| Motherboard | Intel S1200BTL |
| PSU | Supermicro PWS-502 (80+) |
Supermicro's MicroCloud SYS-5038ML-H8TRF
We enabled four nodes, each with an Intel Xeon E3-1230L v3. Each node was configured with:
| CPU | Intel Xeon processor E3-1230L v3 |
| RAM | 4x 8GB DDR3 @1600 |
| Internal Disks | 1x Intel MLC SSD710 200GB |
| Motherboard | Super X10SLD-F |
| PSU | Dual Supermicro PWS-1K62P-1R (1.6 KW, 80+ Platinum) for 4 nodes |
We first tested with only one PSU, but that did not work out as the firmware kept all Xeons at their minimum clock speed of 800 MHz. Only with both PSUs active were the Xeon able to use all their p-states. Supermicro confirmed that four active nodes should be enough to make the PSU run efficiently.
HP Moonshot
We tested two different cartridges: the m400 and the m300. Below you can find the specs of the m400:
| CPU/SoC | AppliedMicro X-Gene 2.4 |
| RAM | 8x 8GB DDR3 @ 1600 |
| Internal Disks | m2 2280 Solid State 120GB |
| Cartridge | m400 |
And the m300:
| CPU/SoC | Atom C2750 2.4 |
| RAM | 8x 8GB DDR3 @ 1600 |
| Internal Disks | m2 2280 Solid State 120GB |
| Cartridge | m300 |
Other Notes
Both servers are fed by a standard European 230V (16 Amps max.) power line. The room temperature is monitored and kept at 23°C by our Airwell CRACs. We use the Racktivity ES1008 Energy Switch PDU to measure power consumption in our lab. We used the HP Moonshot ILO to measure the power consumption of the cartridges.
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Wilco1 - Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - link
GCC4.9 doesn't contain all the work in GCC5.0 (close to final release, but you can build trunk). As you hinted in the article, it is early days for AArch64 support, so there is a huge difference between a 4.9 and 5.0 compiler, so 5.0 is what you'd use for benchmarking.JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - link
You must realize that the situation in the ARM ecosystem is not as mature as on x86. the X-Gene runs on a specially patched kernel that has some decent support for ACPI, PCIe etc. If you do not use this kernel, you'll get in all kinds of hardware trouble. And afaik, gcc needs a certain version of the kernel.Wilco1 - Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - link
No you can use any newer GCC and GLIBC with an older kernel - that's the whole point of compatibility.Btw your results look wrong - X-Gene 1 scores much lower than Cortex-A15 on the single threaded LZMA tests (compare with results on http://www.7-cpu.com/). I'm wondering whether this is just due to using the wrong compiler/options, or running well below 2.4GHz somehow.
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - link
Hmm. the A57 scores 1500 at 1.9 GHz on compression. The X-Gene scores 1580 with Gcc 4.8 and 1670 with gcc 4.9. Our scores are on the low side, but it is not like they are impossibly low.Ubuntu 14.04, 3.13 kernel and gcc 4.8.2 was and is the standard environment that people will get on the the m400. You can tweak a lot, but that is not what most professionals will do. Then we can also have to start testing with icc on Intel. I am not convinced that the overall picture will change that much with lots of tweaking
Wilco1 - Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - link
Yes, and I'd expect the 7420 will do a lot better than the 5433. But the real surprise to me is that X-Gene 1 doesn't even beat the A15 in Tegra K1 despite being wider, newer and running at a higher frequency - that's why the results look too low.I wouldn't call upgrading to the latest compiler tweaking - for AArch64 that is kind of essential given it is early days and the rate of development is extremely high. If you tested 32-bit mode then I'd agree GCC 4.8 or 4.9 are fine.
CajunArson - Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - link
This is all part of the problem: Requiring people to use cutting edge software with custom recompilation just to beat a freakin' Atom much less a real CPU?You do realize that we could play the same game with all the Intel parts. Believe me, the people who constantly whine that Haswell isn't any faster than Sandy Bridge have never properly recompiled computationally intensive code to take advantage of AVX2 and FMA.
The fact that all those Intel servers were running software that was only compiled for a generic X86-64 target without requiring any special tweaking or exotic hacking is just another major advantage for Intel, not some "cheat".
Klimax - Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - link
And if we are going for cutting edge compiler, then why not ICC with Intel's nice libraries... (pretty sure even ancient atom would suddenly look not that bad)Wilco1 - Tuesday, March 10, 2015 - link
To make a fair comparison you'd either need to use the exact same compiler and options or go all out and allow people to write hand optimized assembler for the kernels.68k - Saturday, March 14, 2015 - link
You can't seriously claim that recompiling an existing program with a different (well known and mature) compiler is equal to hand optimize things in assembler. Hint, one of the options is ridiculous expensive, one is trivial.aryonoco - Monday, March 9, 2015 - link
Thank you Johan. Very very informative article. This is one of the least reported areas of IT in general, and one that I think is poised for significant uptake in the next 5 years or so.Very much appreciate your efforts into putting this together.