The Intel Xeon D Review: Performance Per Watt Server SoC Champion?
by Johan De Gelas on June 23, 2015 8:35 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Xeon-D
- Broadwell-DE
Conclusion: the Xeon D-1540 is awesome
If you only look at the integer performance of a single Broadwell core, the improvement over the Haswell based core is close to boring. But the fact that Intel was able to combine 8 of them together with dual 10 Gbit, 4 USB 3.0 controllers, 6 SATA 3 controller and quite a bit more inside a SoC that needs less than 45 W makes it an amazing product. In fact we have not seen such massive improvements from one Intel generation to another since the launch of the Xeon 5500. The performance per watt of a Xeon D-1540 is 50% better than the Haswell based E3 (Xeon E3-1230L).
Most of the design wins of the Xeon D are network and storage devices and, to a lesser degree, micro servers. Intel also positions the Xeon D machines at the Datacenter/Network edge, even as an IOT gateway.
Now, granted, market positioning slides are all about short powerful messages and leave little room for nuance. But since we have room for lengthier commentaries, our job is to talk about nuances. So we feel the Xeon D can do a lot more. It can be a mid range java server, text search engine or high-end development machine. In can be a node inside a web server cluster that takes heavy traffic.
In fact the Xeon D-1540 ($581) makes the low end of the Xeon E5 SKUs such as the E5-2630 (6 cores at 2.3 GHz, 95 W, $612) look pretty bad for a lot of workloads. Why would you pay more for such E5 server that consumes a lot more? The answer is some HPC applications, as our results show. The only advantage such a low end dual socket E5 server has is memory capacity and the fact that you can use two of them (up to 12 cores).
So as long as you do not make the mistake to use it for memory intensive HPC applications (note most HPC apps are memory intensive) and 8 cores is enough for you, the Xeon D is probably the most awesome product Intel has delivered in years, even if it is slightly hidden away from the mainstream.
Where does this leave the ARM server plans?
The Xeon D effectively puts a big almost unbreakable lock on some parts of the server market in the short and mid term (as Intel will undoubtably further improve the Xeon D line). It is hard to see how anyone can offer an server SoC in the short term that can beat the sky high performance per watt ratio when performing dynamic web serving for example.
However, the pricing and power envelope (about 60W in total for a "micro" server) of the Xeon D still leaves quite a bit of room in markets where density and pricing is everything. You do not need Xeon D power to run a caching or static web server as an Atom C2000-level of performance and a lot of DRAM slots will do. There are some chances here, but we would really like to see some real products instead of yet another slide deck with great promises. Frankly we don't think that the standard ARM designs will do. The A57 is probably not strong enough for the "non-micro server" market and it remains to be seen if the A72 will a large enough improvement. More specialized designs such as Cavium Thunder-X, Qualcomms Kryo or Broadcomm Vulcan might still capture a niche market in the foreseeable future.
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JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
Hi Patrick, the base clock of our chip is 2 GHz, not 1.9 GHz as the one pre-production version that we got from Intel. I have to check the turboclocks though, but I do believe we have measured 2.6 GHz. I'll doublecheck.pjkenned - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
Awesome! Our ES ones were 1.9GHz.Chrisrodinis1 - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
For comparison, this server uses Xeon's. It is the HP Proliant BL460c G9 blade server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s_w8JVmvf0MrDiSante - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
Why use only -O2 when compiling the benchmarks? I would imagine that in order to squeeze out every last bit of performance, all production software is compiled with all optimizations turned up to 11. I noticed that their github uses -O2 as an example - is it that TinyMemBenchmark just doesn't play nice with -O3?JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
The standard makefile had no optimization whatsoever. If you want to measure latency, you do not want maximum performance but rather accuracy, so I played it safe and used -O2. I am not convinced that all production software is optimized with all optimization turned on.diediealldie - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
Intel seems disARMing them... X-Gene 2 doesn't look so promising, as they'll have to fight mighty Skylake-based Xeons, not Broadwell ones.Thanks for great article again.
jfallen - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
Thanks Johan for the great article. I'm a tech enthusiast, and will never buy or use one of these. But it makes great reading and I appreciate the time you take to research and write the article.Regards
Jordan
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
Happy to read this! :-)TomWomack - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
This looks very much consistent with my experience; the disconcertingly high idle power (I looked at the board with a thermal camera; the hot chips were the gigabit PHY, the inductors for the power supply, and the AST2400 management chip), the surprisingly good memory performance, the fairly hot SoC (running sixteen threads of number-crunching I get a power draw of 83W at the plug) and the generally pretty good computation.I'm not entirely sure it was a better buy for my use case than a significantly cheaper 6-core Haswell E - Haswell E is not that hot, electricity not that expensive, and from my supplier the X10SDV-F board and memory were £929 whilst Scan get me an i7-5820K board, CPU and memory for £702. And four-channel DDR4 probably is usefully faster than two-channel for what I do.
I quite strongly don't believe in server mystique - the outbuilding is big enough that I run out of power before I run out of space for micro-ATX cases, and I am lucky enough to be doing calculations which are self-checking to the point that ECC is a waste of money.
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
Hi Tom, I believe we saw up to 90 Watt at the wall when running OpenFOAM (10 Gbit enabled). It is however less relevant for such a chip which is not meant to be a HPC chip as we have shown in the article. HPC really screams for an E5.