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
Intel's Benchmarks
Since time constraints meant that we were not able to run a ton of benchmarks ourselves, it's useful to check out Intel's own benchmarks as well. In our experience Intel's own benchmarking has a good track record for producing accurate numbers and documenting configuration details. Of course, you have to read all the benchmarking information carefully to make sure you understand just what is being tested.
The OLTP and virtualization benchmarks show that the new Xeon E7 v3 is about 25 to 39% faster than the previous Xeon E7 (v2). In some of those benchmarks, the new Xeon had twice as much memory, but it is safe to say that this will make only a small difference. We think it's reasonable to conclude that the Xeon E7 is 25 to 30% faster, which is also what we found in our integer benchmarks.
The increase in legacy FP application is much lower. For example Cinebench was 14% faster, SPECFP 9% and our own OpenFOAM was about 4% faster. Meanwhile linpack benchmarks are pretty useless to most of the HPC world, so we have more faith in our own benchmarking. Intel's own realistic HPC benchmarking showed at best a 19% increase, which is nothing to write home about.
The exciting part about this new Xeon E7 is that data analytics/mining happens a lot faster on the new Xeon E7 v3. The 72% faster SAS analytics number is not really accurate as part of the speedup was due to using P3700 SSDs instead of the S3700 SSD. Still, Intel claims that the replacing the E7 v2 with the v3 is good for a 55-58% speedup.
The most spectacular benchmark is of course SAP HANA. It is not 6x faster as Intel claims, but rather 3.3x (see our comments about TSX). That is still spectacular and the result of excellent software and hardware engineering.
Final Words: Comparing Xeon E7 v3 vs V2
For those of us running scale-up, reasonably priced HPC or database applications, it is hard to get excited about the Xeon E7 v3. The performance increases are small-but-tangible, however at the same time the new Xeon E7 costs a bit more. Meanwhile as far as our (HPC) energy measurements go, there is no tangible increase in performance per watt.
The Xeon E7 in its natural habitat: heavy heatsinks, hotpluggable memory
However organizations running SAP HANA will welcome the new Xeon E7 with open arms, they get massive speedups for a 0.1% or less budget increase. The rest of the data mining community with expensive software will benefit too, as the new Xeon E7 is at least 50% faster in those applications thanks to TSX.
Ultimately we wonder how the rest of us will fare. Will SAP/SAS speedups also be visible in open source Big Data software such as Hadoop and Elastic Search? Currently we are still struggling to get the full potential out of the 144 threads. Some of these tests run for a few days only to end with a very vague error message: big data benchmarking is hard.
Comparing Xeon E7 v3 and POWER8
Although the POWER8 is still a power gobbling monster, just like its older brother the POWER7, there is no denying that IBM has made enormous progress. Few people will be surprised that IBM's much more expensive enterprise systems beat Intel based offerings in the some high-end benchmarks like SAP's. But the fact that 24 POWER8 cores in a relatively reasonably priced IBM POWER8 server can beat 36 Intel Haswell cores by a considerable margin is new.
It is also interesting that our own integer benchmarking shows that the POWER8 core is capable of keeping up with Intel's best core at the same clockspeed (3.3-3.4 GHz). Well, at least as long as you feed it enough threads in IPC unfriendly code. But that last sentence is the exact description of many server workloads. It also means that the SAP benchmark is not an exception: the IBM POWER8 is definitely not the best CPU to run Crysis (not enough threads) but it is without a doubt a dangerous competitor for Xeon E7 when given enough threads to fill up the CPU.
Right now the threat to Intel is not dire, IBM still asks way too much for its best POWER8 systems and the Xeons have a much better performance-per-watt ratio. But once the OpenPOWER fondation partners start offering server solutions, there is a good chance that Intel will receive some very significant performance-per-dollar competition in the server market.
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Dmcq - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Well they'll sell where performance is an absolute must but they won't pose a problem to Intel as they won't take a large part of the market and they'd keep prices high. I see the main danger to Intel being in 64 bit ARMs eating the server market from below. I suppose one could have cheap and low power POWER machines to attack the main market but somehow it just seems unlikely with their background.Guest8 - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Uh did you see Anandtech's reviews on the latest ARM server? The thing barely keeps up with an Avoton. Intel is well aware of ARM based servers and has preemptively disARMed the threat. If ARM could ever deliver Xeon class performance it would look like Power8.melgross - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Chip TDP is mostly a concern for the chip itself. Other areas contribute far more waste heat than the CPU does.PowerTrumps - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Power doesn't need to have a TDP of 1000W but 200W is nothing given the performance and efficiency advantage of the processors and Power hypervisor. When you can consolidate 2, 4 and 10 2 socket Intel servers into 1 x 2 socket Power8 server that is 10 x 2 x 135W = 2700 overall Watts vs 400W with the Power server. Power reduces the overall energy, cooling and rack space consumption.KAlmquist - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
$4115 E5-2699 (18C, 2.3 Ghz (3.6 Ghz turbo), max memory 768 GB)$5896 E7-8880 (18C, 2.3 Ghz (3.1 Ghz turbo), max memory 1536 GB)
That's a big premium for the E7--enough that it probably doesn't make sense to buy an 8 socket system just to run a bunch of applications in parallel. The E7 makes sense only if you need more than 36 cores to have access to the same memory.
PowerTrumps - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
I really enjoyed the article as well as the many data and comparison charts. It is unfortunate that most of your statements, assessments and comparisons about Power and with Intel to Power were either wrong, misleading, not fully explained or out of context. I invite the author to contact me and I will be happy to walk you through all of this so you can update this article as well as consider a future article that shows the true advantage Power8 and OpenPower truly has in the data center and the greater value available to customers.KAlmquist - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
I would be surprised if anybody working for Anandtech is going to contact an anonymous commentator. You can point out portions of the article that you think are wrong or misleading in this comment section.To do a really good article on Power8, Anandtech needs a vendor to give Anandtech access to a system to review.
PowerTrumps - Sunday, May 10, 2015 - link
Admittedly I assumed when I registered for the PowerTrumps account some time ago I used a email address which they could look up. But, your point is taken. Brett Murphy with Software Information Systems (aka SIS) www.thinksis.com. Email at bmurphy@thinksis.com. If I pointed out all of the mistakes my comment would look like a blog which many don't appreciate. I have my own blog for that. I like well written articles and happy to accept criticism or shortcomings with IBM Power - just use accurate data and not misrepresent anything. Before Anandtech reviews a Power8 server, my assessment is they need to understand what makes Power tick and how it is different than Intel or SPARC for that matter. Hope they contact me.thunng8 - Sunday, May 10, 2015 - link
I too would like a more detailed review of the Power8.Some of the text in the article made me laugh on how wrong they are.
For example, the great surprise that Intel is not on top.. Well anandtech has never test any Power systems before..
And it is laughable to make any conclusions based on running of 7zip. Just about any serious enterprise server benchmark shows a greater than 2x performance advantage per core in favor of Power compared to the best Xeons. So that 50% advantage is way less than expected.
Btw Power7 for most of its life bested Xeon in performance by very large margins. It is just now that IBM have opened up Power to other vendor that makes it exciting.
JohanAnandtech - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link
I welcome constructive critism. And yes, we only had access to an IBM Power8 dev machine, so we only got a small part of the machine (1 core/2GB)."Some of the text in the article made me laugh on how wrong they are."
That is pretty low. Without any pointer or argument, nobody can check your claims. Please state your concerns or mail me.