The Intel Xeon E7-8800 v3 Review: The POWER8 Killer?

Xeon E7 v3 SKUs and prices

Intel SKU list has always been complex and very long.  For reference, this is what the Xeon E7 v2 line-up looked like when it launched in 2014:

There is a scalable 2S line that is not scalable beyond 2 sockets, a frequency optimized 8857 which is probably faster in many applications than the 8893 and so on.

Luckily, with the introduction of the Xeon E7 v3, Intel simplified the SKU list. 

First of all, the hardly scalable 2 socket version is gone. And at the low-end, you now get a 8-core processor at 2 GHz instead of a 6-core at 1.9 GHz. Well done, Intel.

The high-end models are all capable of running in 8 socket configurations. But the enterprise people looking for a high-end quad socket system have to pay a bit more: about 8 to 10%.  Most enterprise people will not care, but getting 20% more cores (slightly improved) at 8-10% lower clocks while paying about 8% more is not exactly a vast improvement. Of course these are paper specs, but Intel used to be (a lot) more generous. 

Intel's own slides confirm this. The gains in SPECint2006_rate are pretty small to justify the price increase. Intel claims higher OLTP (TPC-C) increases, but the mentioned gains are rather optimistic. For example, the HammerDB benchmark runs 29% faster on the E7-8890 v3 than on the E7-4890v2. This benchmark is much more transparant, straight forward and easier to reproduce than TPC-C, so we feel it is probably closer to the real world. Secondly, in both cases (HammerDB and TPC-C), the E7-8890v3 had twice as much memory (1 TB vs 512 GB) memory as its predecessor. 

Lastly, these are benchmarks after all. In the real world systems are not running at full speed, so the gains are much smaller.  So it seems that in most applications besides the TSX/AVX2 enabled ones, the gains will be rather small.