Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 and E5-2650 v3 Review: Haswell-EP with 10 Cores

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• JarredWalton - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link

  For ten cores I wouldn't expect a huge bump over the "minimum guaranteed" speed. It's one thing to boost a few cores by a large amount, but the whole problem with multi-core designs is that if you load up all the cores then either you have massive power consumption or you need to curtail the clocks. Honestly, running ten cores at 100% and still hitting 3.1GHz is impressive in my book -- and it still consumes up to 160W.

• Carl Bicknell - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link

  I got my numbers a bit wrong: the 2687W is 3.1 GHz default and 3.2 GHz all cores on turbo, according to wikipedia.
  
  That's disappointing.
  
  Apart from anything else, they've managed to get their best 12 (yes twelve!) core CPU (E5-2690 v3) to operate at 3.1 GHz turbo all cores in a 135 W design.
  
  With two fewer cores and an extra 25 watts I'd hope for more than a mere 100 MHz performance.

• NovoRei - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link

  Ian, could you comment on performance with pure AVX2 and mixed AVX instructions and where the W version stands?
  
  Thanks.

• Laststop311 - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link

  4100 for an 18 core ill take 2

• ruthan - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link

  I would like to see, benchmarks some of those low power - 6/12 or 12/24 - 55W a 65W models.

• pokazene_maslo - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link

  Is it possible to override turbo boost to force all cores to run at maximum turbo freqency? (E5-2687W-v3 running all cores at 3.5GHz)

• alpha754293 - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link

  Well, the thing with these "big" multicore systems is no different than testing large SMP system. You have to use programs for applications that where it make sense to use it. For engineering analyses and simulations, even HOW a problem is divided up (from a single, much larger problem) can have an impact on not only the speed for the analysis/simulation, but also the accuracy of the simulation, and you have to have a pretty sound understanding of the math and physics involved in order to make the best determination.
  
  And for some applications, there is such a thing and you CAN have TOO many cores (where you've divided up a problem so much that it's now so small that it can't fully load a core up anymore, and that the process of dividing and re-assembling the results takes an extremely large amount of time.) (You can run into that with some of the FEA analysis).
  
  I was working with Johan and studying a while slew of parameters using LS-DYNA to study how the various ways of decomposing a problem can have an impact on the crash test simulation results, and how swap performance means EVERYTHING when it comes to mechanical engineering simluations.

• mapesdhs - Thursday, October 16, 2014 - link

  
  Oddly enough this can be the case with animation rendering aswell. I know a movie studio
  which uses a system that can exclude cores from a render pipeline so there is more RAM
  and cache bandwidth available with a fewer number of cores. This can matter because
  sometimes complex film renders can use huge amounts of data. Someone at SPI told me
  one frame of a big movie can involve 500GB of data.
  
  Interesting how the same issue can crop up in such widely different fields.
  
  Ian.

• RAMdiskSeeker - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link

  Could you please test these motherboards for supporting ECC unbuffered DIMMs, reporting that ECC is active, and overclocking potential with ECC DIMMs? It would be good to know whether Xeon chips on non-server motherboards can use ECC.

• nutral - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link

  What still is strange to me is that there is still no workstation cpu focused on a workstation with single threaded software. Wouldn't an i7 cpu still be much faster than this workstation cpu?