Intel Xeon E5 Version 3: Up to 18 Haswell EP Cores
by Johan De Gelas on September 8, 2014 12:30 PM ESTWebsite Performance: Drupal 7.21
While there are few web servers that actually need such processing behemoths, we decided to go ahead and test in this area, just for the sake of satifying our curiosity. Most websites are based on the LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Few people write HTML/PHP code from scratch these days, so we turned to running a Drupal 7.21 based site. The web server is Apache 2.4.7 and the database is MySQL 5.5.38 on top of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Drupal powers massive sites like The Economist and MTV Europe and has a reputation of being a hardware resources hog. That is a price more and more developers pay happily for lowering the time to market for their work. We tested the Drupal website with our vApus stress testing framework and increased the number of connections from 5 to 1500.
First we report the maximum throughput achievable with 95% percent of requests being handled faster than 100 ms. It is important to note that there's a chance that a user experiences a much slower response time on a request, which could be much longer than 100 ms. Also, as each page view consists of many requests, there's an increased chance that one of the "slow responses" is among them. So the average response time is definitely a very bad indicator of user experience, and ensuring the 95% percentile is still fast enough is a lot safer.
In the case of our Drupal testing, the new Haswell EP Xeons definitely take the lead, but at the top of the stack we don't see a lot of scaling with additional cores – the E5-2699 v3 and the E5-2695 v3 deliver nearly the same result. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the database of our current test website is too small. The second is that we still need to fine tune the configuration of our website to scale better with such high core counts.
We'll remedy this in the future as we adapt our tuning. Right now, it seems that we get good scaling up to 24 physical cores, but beyond that our tuning probably needs more work. Nevertheless, we felt we should share this result as most website owners do not have a specialized "make it scale" engineering team like Google and Facebook. And yes, it is probably better to load balance your website over several smaller nodes.
Still, the results are quite interesting. It looks like the new Xeon v3 scales better. The Xeon E5-2690 has no trouble keeping up – thanks to its higher clock speed – with the Ivy Bridge EP Xeon, which features a higher core count. The Xeon E5-2650L v3 has a lower clock speed but is able to use its higher core count to perform better. One of the reasons might be the fact that synchronization latency has been significantly improved.
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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.