Intel Xeon E5 Version 3: Up to 18 Haswell EP Cores
by Johan De Gelas on September 8, 2014 12:30 PM ESTJava Server Performance
According to the documentation, the SPECjbb 2013 benchmark has "a usage model based on a world-wide supermarket company with an IT infrastructure that handles a mix of point-of-sale requests, online purchases, and data-mining operations". It uses the latest Java 7 features and makes use of XML, compressed communication, and messaging with security. We tested with four groups of transaction injectors and backends.
Several readers commented that we should try to optimize for lower response times instead of just optimizing for maximum throughput, so we have changed our relatively basic tuning. We left out "+AggressiveOpts" as this is still somewhat a risk for stability and the performance does not increase tangibly, and we used "-XX:+AlwaysPreTouch". Also we are more generous with the amount of allocated memory. These results are thus no longer comparable to our previous results. Our full parameters are:
"-server -Xmx8G -Xms8G -Xmn4G -XX:+AlwaysPreTouch -XX:+UseLargePages"
With these settings, the benchmark takes about 47GB-52GB of RAM. The first metric is basically maximum throughput.
Our new tuning has resulted in higher results, and all of the new Xeon scale well. However, if you start looking at it from a performance/watt perspective, the results are good but not spectacular. The power consumption of the Xeon E5-2695 v3 is similar to the Xeon E5-2697 v2, and the former has a 13% performance advantage.
The Critical-jOPS metric, is a throughput metric under response time constraint (SLA).
With our new tuning, the critical jOPS make a lot more sense, so we believe we have taken a step forward. Notice that the Xeon E5-2695 v3, despite its clock speed disadvantage (2.3 at least, 2.8 at the most), is capable of keeping up with the Xeon E5-2697 v2 (2.7 at the least, 3GHz at the most). The improvements in Haswell are measureable.
However, it must be said that while this is a step forward if you're buying a server, it's not a large one. You get 13% more throughput and the same response time for a few hundred dollars less (Xeon E5-2695 v3 vs E5-2697 v2).
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bsd228 - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Now go price memory for M class Sun servers...even small upgrades are 5 figures and going 4 years back, a mid sized M4000 type server was going to cost you around 100k with moderate amounts of memory.And take up a large portion of the rack. Whereas you can stick two of these 18 core guys in a 1U server and have 10 of them (180 cores) for around the same sort of money.
Big iron still has its place, but the economics will always be lousy.
platinumjsi - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
ASRock are selling boards with DDR3 support, any idea how that works?http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.as...
TiGr1982 - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Well... ASRock is generally famous "marrying" different gen hardware.But here, since this is about DDR RAM, governed by the CPU itself (because memory controller is inside the CPU), then my only guess is Xeon E5 v3 may have dual-mode memory controller (supporting either DDR4 or DDR3), similarly as Phenom II had back in 2009-2011, which supported either DDR2 or DDR3, depending on where you plugged it in.
If so, then probably just the performance of E5 v3 with DDR3 may be somewhat inferior in comparison with DDR4.
alpha754293 - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
No LS-DYNA runs? And yes, for HPC applications, you actually CAN have too many cores (because you can't keep the working cores pegged with work/something to do, so you end up with a lot of data migration between cores, which is bad, since moving data means that you're not doing any useful work ON the data).And how you decompose the domain (for both LS-DYNA and CFD makes a HUGE difference on total runtime performance).
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
No, I hope to get that one done in the more Windows/ESXi oriented review.Klimax - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Nice review. Next stop: Windows Server. (And MS-SQL..)JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Agreed. PCIe Flash and SQL server look like a nice combination to test this new Xeons.TiGr1982 - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem-EP): up to 4 cores (45 nm)Xeon 5600 series (Westmere-EP): up to 6 cores (32 nm)
Xeon E5 v1 (Sandy Bridge-EP): up to 8 cores (32 nm)
Xeon E5 v2 (Ivy Bridge-EP): up to 12 cores (22 nm)
Xeon E5 v3 (Haswell-EP): up to 18 cores (22 nm)
So, in this progression, core count increases by 50% (1.5 times) almost each generation.
So, what's gonna be next:
Xeon E5 v4 (Broadwell-EP): up to 27 cores (14 nm) ?
Maybe four rows with 5 cores and one row with 7 cores (4 x 5 + 7 = 27) ?
wallysb01 - Wednesday, September 10, 2014 - link
My money is on 24 cores.SuperVeloce - Tuesday, September 9, 2014 - link
What's the story with 2637v3? Only 4 cores and the same freqency and $1k price as 6core 2637v2? By far the most pointless cpu on the list.