The Intel Xeon E7-8800 v3 Review: The POWER8 Killer?
by Johan De Gelas on May 8, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- IT Computing
- Intel
- Xeon
- Haswell
- Enterprise
- server
- Enterprise CPUs
- POWER
- POWER8
SAP S&D Benchmark
The SAP SD (Sales and Distribution, 2-Tier Internet Configuration) benchmark is an interesting benchmark as it is a real-world client-server application. It is one of those rare industry benchmarks that actually means something to the real IT professionals. Even better, the SAP ERP software is a prime example of where these Xeon E7 v2 chips will be used. We looked at SAP's benchmark database for these results.
Most of the results below all run on Windows 2008/2012 and MS SQL Server (both 64-bit). Every 2-Tier Sales & Distribution benchmark was performed with SAP's latest ERP 6 Enhancement Package 4. We analyzed the SAP Benchmark in-depth in one of our earlier articles. The profile of the benchmark has remained the same:
- Very parallel resulting in excellent scaling
- Low to medium IPC, mostly due to "branchy" code
- Somewhat limited by memory bandwidth
- Likes large caches (memory latency)
- Very sensitive to sync ("cache coherency") latency
Let's see how the quad Xeon compares to the previous Intel generation, the cheaper dual socket systems, and the RISC competition.
When we said that the competition in the high-end market was heating up, we were not kidding. The dual socket (24-core) S824 beats the dual socket Xeon E5 by a large margin (+35%), despite the latter having 50% more cores (36 vs 24).
At IBM's website, this server is priced at $65k, but the actual street prices are around $35k, slightly below what a typical similar quad Xeon costs (around $40k) .Of course, IBM should make it easier for small enterprises to get their hardware quickly at a decent price. But this shows that it is not impossible that POWER servers can become an alternative to the typical x86 systems... just not from IBM's webstore. The POWER8 system might be somewhat cheaper to acquire than the HP DL580 Gen9, but that Intel system is still almost 40% faster, so IBM is not an alternative quite yet. Then again, IBM is a lot more competitive than a few years ago. The S824 is not that far behind the Quad Xeon E7 v2, so it is a good thing that the new Xeon E7 offers about 20% better performance than the latter.
So who is on the top of server foodchain?
They might be power hungry, but the new POWER8 has made the Enterprise line of IBM more competitive than ever. Gone are the days that IBM needed more CPU sockets than Intel to get the top spot. Nevertheless, it should be noted that you can get several 8-socket Xeon systems for the price of one IBM E870 enterprise server.
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PowerTrumps - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Oracle has been unable to develop a power core let alone a processor. What they have done is created servers with many cores and many threads albeit weak cores/threads. The S3 core was an improvement and no reason to think the S4 won't be decent either. However, the M7 will come (again, true to form) with 32 cores per socket. It will be like 8 mini clusters of 4 cores because they are unable to develop a single SMP chip with shared resources across all of the cores. As such, these mini clusters will have their own resources which will lead to latency and inefficiencies. Oracle is a software business and their goal is to run software on either the most cores possible or the most inefficient. They have both of these bases covered with their Intel and SPARC business.Also, performance per Watt is important for Intel because what you see is what you get. With Power though, when you have strong single thread performance, strong multi-thread performance and tremendous consolidation efficiency due to Power Hypervisor efficiency means ~200W doesn't matter when you can consolidate 2, 4 maybe 10 Intel chips at 135W each into a single Power chip because of this hypervisor efficiency.
tynopik - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
pg4 - datam iningder - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
Woo...we're bout to have another GHz War here!usernametaken76 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
I'm sure you mean figuratively. We've been stuck between 4-5 GHz on POWER architecture for closing in on a decade.zamroni - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
My conclusion is Samsung should buy AMD to reduce Intel dominance.alpha754293 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
It would have been interesting to see the LS-DYNA benchmark results again (so that you can compare it against some of the tests that you've ran previously). But very interesting...JohanAnandtech - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
Give me some help and we'll do that again on an update version :-)alpha754293 - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Not a problem. You have my email address right? And if not, I'll just send you another email and we can get that going again. :) Thanks.andychow - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
If Samsung bought AMD, they would lose the licence for both x86 and x86_64 production. It would in fact ensure Intel's dominance of the market.Kevin G - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
The x86 license can be transferred as long as Intel signs off on the deal (and it is in their best interest to do so). What will probably happen is that if any company buys AMD, the new owner will enter a cross licensing agreement with Intel.