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
Saving Power
Efficiency is very important in many scenarios, so let's start by checking out idle power consumption. Most of our servers have a different form factor. Some (X-Gene, Atom c2750 in HP Moonshot) are micro-servers sharing a common PSU and some are based upon a motherboard that has a lot of storage interfaces (the C2750 server, the SYS-5028D-TN4T). Our Xeon E5 was running inside a heavy 2U rackserver, so we did not include those power readings.
But with some smart measurements, some deductions and a large grain of salt we can get somewhere. We ask our readers to take some time to analyze the measurements below.
(*) Calculated as if the Xeon E3 was run in an "m300-ish" board.
(**) See our comments
The server based upon the ASUS P9D-MH is the most feature rich board in our comparison. The C2750 measurements show how much difference a certain board can make - the Asrock C2750D4I which targets the storage market needs 31 W, and by comparison the m300 micro server inside the HP Moonshot needs only 11 W. The last measurement does not include the losses of the PSUs, but it still shows how much difference, even in idle, the board makes.
The board inside the supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T - the Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F - is a bit more compact than the Asus P9D-MH, and is very similar to the ASRock C2750D4I. But inside SYS-5028D-TN4T we also find a storage backplane and a large fan in the back. So we disabled several components to find out what their impact wass.
- 0.5 Watt for the large fan in the back of chassis
- 0.5 Watt for the fan on top of the heatsink
- 0.5 Watt for the storage backplane
- 3.5 Watt for 10 Gbit Ethernet PHY
In order to make the Supermicro similar to the C2750DI, we disable the large fan, we removed the storage backplane and disable the 10 Gb Ethernet PHY in BIOS. The result was that the idle power lowered from 31W to 27W. The only difference was that the Asrock C2750D4I uses a large passive heatsink and the Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F uses a small fan. We found out that the fan uses about 0.5 Watt, so we have reason to believe that the Xeon D consumes slightly less or similar at idle than the Atom C2750.
For those who have missed our review of the X-Gene 1, remember that the software ecosystem for ARM is not ready yet (ACPI and PCIe support) and that the Ubuntu running on top of the X-Gene was not the vanilla Ubuntu 14.04 but a customized/patched one. Also the X-Gene 1 is baked with an older 40 nm process.
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Flunk - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Yes, but it's still bad marketing. -D is associated with inferior, overly hot, bad performing Intel chips.IanHagen - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Certainly. From a marketing standpoint it's a pretty poor choice. I agree with wussupi, E4 would haven been a far better name.karpodiem - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
does anyone know where to buy these online? I'm looking for just the board/processor, model # 'X10SDV-TLN4F'All these random/small Supermicro resellers are selling it now, based on some Google searches. They're marking it up in price by at least a hundred bucks, because availability is limited. Anyone know when Newegg might get it in stock?
Looking to do a FreeNAS build - this board + IBM M1015 card in an ATX motherboard (6x4TB drives in RAIDZ2).
ats - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
The TLN4F is the one in most demand and almost no place is able to keep it in stock. There are multiple places that will order it for you for ~1K but wait times can be anywhere from 1 week to 1 month.Jon Tseng - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
> And the reality is that the current SoCs with an ARM ISA do not deliver the necessary per core> performance: they are still micro server SoCs, at best competing with the Atom C2750. So
> currently, there is no ARM SoC competition in the scale out market until something better than
> the A57 hits the market for these big players.
Dude... You really want to have a look at the latest ThunderX parts or the X-Gene 16nm shrinks before you start making unwise statements like that. These aren't waiting around for A57 they are custom ARM architecture designs. Per core performance might not be as hot as Xeon but once you start to throw 48 cores on a die I wouldn't quite call that "at best competing with Avaton".
smoohta - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Link to reviews?ats - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
X-Gene is in the article, any further shrinks are still entirely vapor. ThunderX isn't currently available is is likely to have significantly worse per core performance than Atom C2k series and worse than A57. All the cores in the world don't do jack if the ST isn't there. And ST performance IS a barrier even in scale out. For general scale out, C2750 was found fairly wanting because of the ST performance, and neither X-Gene nor ThunderX even compete with C2750 in ST performance... QED.mczak - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
He said "currently". The X-Gene 16nm cores might offer some competition who knows - but those are X-Gene 3 whereas you can't even buy anything with X-Gene 2 28nm ones right now... Likewise, ThunderX servers have been announced, but I haven't seen any reviews yet.name99 - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Look at the ThunderX parts HOW? Cavium releases fsck-all information about them. No-one knows if they are even OoO, how wide they are, etc.Yes, there are 48 cores on a SoC; and presumably they will do well for tasks like memcached that like lots of low-performance parallelism. But right now, we have ZERO evidence that a ThunderX part is a better single-threaded core than A57, let alone that it's comparable to Broadwell.
der - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
NOICE FAM!