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
I'm sure the author will update the article unless this was a Intel cheerleading piece.name99 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
The thing is called E7-8890. Not E7-5890?WTF Intel? Is your marketing team populated by utter idiots? Exactly what value is there in not following the same damn numbering scheme that your product line has followed for the past eight years or so?
Something like that makes the chip look like there's a whole lot of "but this one goes up to 11" thinking going on at Intel...
name99 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
OK, I get it. The first number indicates the number of glueless chips, not the micro-architecture generation. Instead we do that (apparently) with a v2 or v3 suffix.I still claim this is totally idiotic. Far more sensible would be to use the same scheme as the other Intel processors, and use a suffix like S2, S4, S8 to show the glueless SMP capabilities.
ZeDestructor - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
They've been using this convention since Westmere-EX actually, at which point they ditched their old convention of a prefix letter for power tier, followed by one digit for performance/scalability tier, followed by another digit for generation then the rest for individual models. Now we have 2xxx for dual socket, 4xxx for quad socket and 8xxx for 8+ sockets, and E3/E5/E7 for the scalability tier. I'm fine with either, though I have a slight preference for the current naming scheme because the generation is no longer mixed into the main model number.Morawka - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
man the power 8 is a beefy cpu... all that cache, you'd think it would walk all over intel.. but intel's superior cpu design winsPowerTrumps - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
please explaintsk2k - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Where are the gaming benchmarks?JohanAnandtech - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Is there still a game with software rendering? :-)Gigaplex - Sunday, May 10, 2015 - link
Llvmpipe on Linux gives a capable (feature wise) OpenGL implementation on the CPU.Klimax - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Don't see POWER getting anywhere with that kind of TDP. There will be dearth of datacenters and other hosting locations retooling for such thing. And I suspect not many will even then take it as cooling and power costs will be damn too high.Problem is, IBM can't go lower with TDP as architecture features enabling such performance are directly responsible for such TDP. (Just L1 consumes 2W to keep few cycles latency at high frequency)