Intel Xeon E5 Version 3: Up to 18 Haswell EP Cores
by Johan De Gelas on September 8, 2014 12:30 PM ESTNext Stop: the Uncore
Continuing with our review of Haswell architecture, let's again take a step back and use the Xeon 5500 as our reference point. The Xeon 5500 is based on the "Nehalem" architecture, and it helped Intel become dominant in the server market. Before the Xeon 5500, AMD's Opteron was still able to outperform the Xeons in quite a few applications (HPC and virtualization for example), even by significant margins. That changed with Nehalem, so the Xeon 5500 is a good reference point.
The 27% cumultative IPC (integer only) improvement of Haswell mentioned is more than just theory: Anand's review of the desktop Haswell CPUs confirmed this. The Haswell Core i7-4770k at the same clock speed is about 21% faster than Nehalem. Now that is below the promised 27% performance increase, but 7-zip is among the applications known to have very low IPC.
Let's go back to the server world. Instead of increasing the clock speeds, clock speeds have declined from 2.93-3.2GHz (Xeon 5500) to 2.3-2.6GHz for the latest high-end parts. However, when Turbo Boost is enabled, 2.8 – 3.1GHz is possible with all cores active. So the clock speed of the high end server CPUs is actually 5 to 20% lower and not 10% higher as in the desktop space. The gains Intel has made in IPC are thus partly negated by slightly lower clock speeds.
Clock speed has clearly been traded in for more cores in most of server SKUs. But the additional cores can prove extremely useful. The SAP S&D application – one of the best industry benchmarks – runs about three times faster (see further) on the latest Xeon E5-2699 v3 than on the Xeon 5500.
This clearly puts into perspective how important the uncore part is for Xeons. The uncore parts makes the difference between a CPU that is only good at running a few handpicked benchmarks (like SPECint rate) but fails to achieve much in real applications, vs. an attractive product that can lower the IT costs by running more virtual machines and offering services to more users.
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LostAlone - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
Given the difference in size between the two companies it's not really all that surprising though. Intel are ten times AMD's size, and I have to imagine that Intel's chip R&D department budget alone is bigger than the whole of AMD. And that is sad really, because I'm sure most of us were learning our computer science when AMD were setting the world on fire, so it's tough to see our young loves go off the rails. But Intel have the money to spend, and can pursue so many more potential avenues for improvement than AMD and that's what makes the difference.Kevin G - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
I'm actually surprised they released the 18 core chip for the EP line. In the Ivy Bridge generation, it was the 15 core EX die that was harvested for the 12 core models. I was expecting the same thing here with the 14 core models, though more to do with power binning than raw yields.I guess with the recent TSX errata, Intel is just dumping all of the existing EX dies into the EP socket. That is a good means of clearing inventory of a notably buggy chip. When Haswell-EX formally launches, it'll be of a stepping with the TSX bug resolved.
SanX - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
You have teased us with the claim that added FMA instructions have double floating point performance. Wow! Is this still possible to do that with FP which are already close to the limit approaching just one clock cycle? This was good review of integer related performance but please combine with Ian to continue with the FP one.JohanAnandtech - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
Ian is working on his workstation oriented review of the latest XeonKevin G - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
FMA is common place in many RISC architectures. The reason why we're just seeing it now on x86 is that until recently, the ISA only permitted two registers per operand.Improvements in this area maybe coming down the line even for legacy code. Intel's micro-op fusion has the potential to take an ordinary multiply and add and fuse them into one FMA operation internally. This type of optimization is something I'd like to see in a future architecture (Sky Lake?).
valarauca - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
The Intel compiler suite I believe already convertsx *= y;
x += z;
into an FMA operation when confronted with them.
Kevin G - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
That's with source that is going to be compiled. (And don't get me wrong, that's what a compiler should do!)Micro-op fusion works on existing binaries years old so there is no recompile necessary. However, micro-op fusion may not work in all situations depending on the actual instruction stream. (Hypothetically the fusion of a multiply and an add in an instruction stream may have to be adjacent to work but an ancient compiler could have slipped in some other instructions in between them to hide execution latencies as an optimization so it'd never work in that binary.)
DIYEyal - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
Very interesting read.And I think I found a typo: page 5 (power optimization). It is well known that THE (not needed) Haswell HAS (is/ has been) optimized for low idle power.
vLsL2VnDmWjoTByaVLxb - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
Colors or labeling for your HPC Power Consumption graph don't seem right.JohanAnandtech - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
Fixed, thanks for pointing it out.