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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
90 Comments
View All Comments
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.