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
Memory Subsystem: Bandwidth
Let's set the stage first and perform some meaningful low level benchmarks. First, we measured the memory bandwidth in Linux. The binary was compiled with the Open64 compiler 5.0 (Opencc). It is a multi-threaded, OpenMP based, 64-bit binary. The following compiler switches were used:
-Ofast -mp -ipa
The results are expressed in GB per second. Note that we also tested with gcc 4.8.1 and compiler options
-O3 –fopenmp –static
Results were consistently 20% to 30% lower with gcc, so we feel our choice of Open64 is appropriate. Everybody can reproduce our results (Open64 is freely available) and since the binary is capable of reaching higher speeds, it is easier to spot speed differences.
We get a 13% increase in bandwidth, which is a result of the faster SMI interface (3.2 GT/s instead 2.67 GT/s). Intel did a good job here: it is not easy to keep bandwidth scaling with the socket count.
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MyNuts - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Charles Babbage would be upsetquadibloc - Thursday, May 14, 2015 - link
I'm shocked to hear that Oracle and IBM are charging more for their SPARC and PowerPC chips, respectively, than Intel is charging for comparable x86 chips - or, at least, I presume they are, if servers using those chips are more expensive. Since x86 has the enormous advantage of being able to run Microsoft Windows, the only way other ISAs can be viable is if they offer better performance or a lower price.Kevin G - Thursday, May 14, 2015 - link
Actually IBM comes in cheaper than Intel for comparable POWER8 hardware. IBM now is offering the processor to outside system builders so the actual prices are some what known. Tyan used to have the raw prices on their site but I can't find them again.Regardless, this article indicates that they top out at $3000 which is less than equivalent Xeon E7's.
kgardas - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
Sure, SPARC and POWER are (was in case of POWER) more expensive, but usually hardware price is nothing in comparison with software price if you are running enterprise. Also SPARC is also Oracle preferred over POWER/Itanium by Oracle's price ratios... Anyway, POWER8 looks so powerful that it may even be cheaper software wise in comparison with SPARC, but that would need some clever Oracle DB benchmarking...HighTech4US - Friday, May 15, 2015 - link
Power 9 will be available when?Phiro69 - Friday, May 15, 2015 - link
I wanted to compare the E7's in this review to the E5's reviewed a few months back in your benchmark comparison tool, but I'm not seeing any of this data in it? Is it going to be there?