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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extide - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
That's ECC Registered, -- not sure if it will take that, but probably, although you dont need registered, or ECC.nils_ - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
If you want transcoding, you might want to look at the Xeon E3 v4 series instead, which come with Iris Pro graphics. Should be a lot more efficient.bernstein - Thursday, June 25, 2015 - link
for using ECC UDIMMs, a cheaper option would be an i3 in a xeon e3 board.psurge - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Has Intel discussed their Xeon-D roadmap at all? I'm wondering in particular if 2x25GbE is coming, whether we can expect a SOC with higher clock-speed or more cores (at a higher TDP), and what the timeframe is for Skylake based cores.nils_ - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Is 25GbE even a standard? I've heard about 40GbE and even 56GbE (matching infiniband), but not 25.psurge - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
It's supposed be a more cost effective speed upgrade to 10GbE than 40GbE (it uses a single 25Gb/s serdes lane, as used in 100GbE, vs 4 10Gb/s lanes), and IIRC is being pushed by large datacenter shops like Google and Microsoft. There's more info at http://25gethernet.org/. I'm not sure where things are in the standardization process.nils_ - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
It also has an interesting property when it comes to using a breakout cable of sorts, you could connect 4 servers to 1 100GbE port (this is already possible with 40GbE which can be split into 4x10GbE).JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
Considering that the Xeon D must find a home in low power high density servers, I think dual 10 Gbit will be standard for a while. Any idea what 25/40 Gbit PHY would consume? Those 10 Gbit PHYs already need 3 Watt in idle, probably around 6-8W at full speed. That is a large chunk of the power budget in a micro/scale out server.psurge - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link
No I don't, sorry. But, I thought SFP+ with SR optics (10GBASE-SR) was < 1W per port, and that SFP+ direct attach (10GBASE-CR) was not far behind? 10GBASE-T is a power hog...pjkenned - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Hey Johan - just re-read. A few quick thoughts:First off - great piece. You do awesome work. (This is Patrick @ ServeTheHome.com btw)
Second - one thing should probably be a bit clearer - you were not using a Xeon D-1540. It was a ES Broadwell-DE version at 2.0GHz. The shipping product has 100MHz higher clocks on both base and max turbo. I did see a 5% or so performance bump from the first ES version we tested to the shipping parts. The 2.0GHz parts are really close to shipping spec though. One both of my pre-release Xeon D and all of the post-release Xeon D systems was nearly identical.
Those will not change your conclusions but does make the actual Intel Xeon D-1540 a bit better than the one you tested. LMK if you want me to set aside some time on a full speed version on a Xeon D-1540 system for you.