Intel Xeon E5 Version 3: Up to 18 Haswell EP Cores
by Johan De Gelas on September 8, 2014 12:30 PM ESTSKUs and Pricing
Before we start with the benchmarks, let's first see what you get for your money. To reduce the clutter, we have not listed all of the SKUs but have tried to include useful points of comparison. Also note that we are not comparing pricing or performance with AMD at this point, as AMD has not updated its server CPU offerings for almost 2 years. The Steamroller architecture was very promising and addressed many of the bottlenecks we discovered in the earlier Opteron 6200, but unfortunately it was never made into a high end server CPU. So basically, Intel's only competition right now is the previous generation Xeons, which means Intel has to convince server buyers that upgrading to the latest Xeon pays off.
| Intel Xeon E5 v2 versus v3 2-socket SKU Comparison | |||||||||
| Xeon E5 | Cores/ Threads |
TDP | Clock Speed (GHz) |
Price | Xeon E5 | Cores/ Threads |
TDP | Clock Speed (GHz) |
Price |
| High Performance (20 – 30MB LLC) | High Performance (35-45MB LLC) | ||||||||
| 2699 v3 | 18/36 | 145W | 2.3-3.6 | $4115 | |||||
| 2698 v3 | 16/32 | 135W | 2.3-3.6 | $3226 | |||||
| 2697 v2 | 12/24 | 130W | 2.7-3.5 | $2614 | 2697 v3 | 14/28 | 145W | 2.6-3.6 | $2702 |
| 2695 v2 | 12/24 | 115W | 2.4-3.2 | $2336 | 2695 v3 | 14/28 | 120W | 2.3-3.3 | $2424 |
| "Advanced" (20-30MB LLC) | |||||||||
| 2690 v2 | 10/20 | 130W | 3-3.6 | $2057 | 2690 v3 | 12/24 | 135W | 2.6-3.5 | $2090 |
| 2680 v2 | 10/20 | 115W | 2.8-3.6 | $1723 | 2680 v3 | 12/24 | 120W | 2.5-3.3 | $1745 |
| 2660 v2 | 10/20 | 115W | 2.2-3.0 | $1389 | 2660 v3 | 10/20 | 105W | 2.6-3.3 | $1445 |
| 2650 v2 | 8/16 | 95W | 2.6-3.4 | $1166 | 2650 v3 | 10/20 | 105W | 2.3-3.0 | $1167 |
| Midrange (10 – 20MB LLC) | Midrange (15-25MB LLC) | ||||||||
| 2640 v2 | 8/16 | 95W | 2.0-2.5 | $885 | 2640 v3 | 8/16 | 90W | 2.6-3.4 | $939 |
| 2630 v2 | 6/12 | 80W | 2.6-3.1 | $612 | 2630 v3 | 8/16 | 85W | 2.4-3.2 | $667 |
| Frequency optimized (15 – 25MB LLC) | Frequency optimized (10-20MB LLC) | ||||||||
| 2687W v2 | 8/16 | 150W | 3.4-4.0 | $2108 | 2687W v3 | 10/20 | 160W | 3.1-3.5 | $2141 |
| 2667 v2 | 8/16 | 130W | 3.3-4.0 | $2057 | 2667 v3 | 8/16 | 135W | 3.2-3.6 | $2057 |
| 2643 v2 | 6/12 | 130W | 3.5-3.8 | $1552 | 2643 v3 | 6/12 | 135W | 3.4-3.7 | $1552 |
| 2637 v2 | 4/12 | 130W | 3.5-3.8 | $996 | 2637 v3 | 4/8 | 135W | 3.5-3.7 | $996 |
| Budget (15MB LLC) | Budget (15MB LLC) | ||||||||
| 2609 v2 | 4/4 | 80W | 2.5 | $294 | 2609 v3 | 6/6 | 85W | 1.9 | $306 |
| 2603 v2 | 4/4 | 80W | 1.8 | $202 | 2603 v3 | 6/6 | 85W | 1.6 | $213 |
| Power Optimized (15 – 25MB LLC) | Power Optimized (20-30MB LLC) | ||||||||
| 2650L v2 | 10/20 | 70W | 1.7-2.1 | $1219 | 2650L v3 | 12/24 | 65W | 1.8-2.5 | $1329 |
| 2630L v2 | 6/12 | 70W | 2.4-2.8 | $612 | 2630L v3 | 8/16 | 55W | 1.8-2.9 | $612 |
At the top of the product stack is the new E5-2699 v3, and it's priced accordingly: over $4000 for the most cores Intel has ever put in a Xeon processor. TDP has also gone up compared to the previous generation's top SKU, but for six additional cores that's probably reasonable.
At first glance, the 2695 v3 looks interesting for the performance hungry as it the cheapest "HCC" (High Core Count) option. You get the largest die with the two memory controllers, 35MB LLC, two rings, and TDP is limited to 120W. Of course the question is how well Turbo Boost will compensate for the relatively low base clock.
For those looking for a good balance between price/performance and power, the 2650L v3 offers a 100MHz higher clock, much higher Turbo Boost, two extra cores, and a slightly lower TDP for about $100 more. This SKU looks very tempting for people who do not need the ultimate in processing power, e.g. those looking for a host for their VMs.
Lastly, there is the 2667 v3 which has a high base clock (3.2) and a still reasonable TDP of 135W for all applications that need processing power but do not scale beyond a certain core count.
Those are the SKUs that we have included in this review, so let's see how they fare.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
85 Comments
View All Comments
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.