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
POWER8 Servers: The Reality Check
As we've just seen, the specs of the POWER8 as announced at launch are very impressive. But what about the in the real world? The top models (10-12 at 4 GHz+, 2TB per socket) are still limited to the extremely expensive E870/E880, which typically costs around 3 times as much (or more) as a comparable Xeon E7 system. But there is light at the end of the tunnel: "PowerLinux" quad socket systems are more expensive than comparable x86 systems, but only by 10 to 30%.
The real competition for x86 must probably come from the third parties of the OpenPower Fondation. IBM sells them POWER8 chips at much more reasonable prices ($2k - $3k), so it is possible to build a reasonably priced POWER8 system. The POWER8 chips sold to third parties are somewhat "lighter" versions, but that is more an advantage than you would think. For example, by keeping the clockspeed a bit lower, the power consumption is lower (190W TDP). These chips also have only 4 (instead of 8) memory buffer chips, which "limits" them to 1 TB of memory, but again this saves quite a bit of power, between 50W and 80W. In other words, the POWER8 chips available to third parties are much more reasonable and even more competitive than the power gobbling, ultra expensive behemoths that got all the attention at launch.
Tyan already has an one socket server and several Taiwanese (Wistron) and Chinese vendors are developing 2 socket systems. Quad socket models are not yet on the horizon as far as we know, but is probably going to change soon.
POWER8 vs. Xeon E5 v3: SPECing It Out
Unfortunately we did not have access to a full blown POWER8 system at this time. But as our loyal readers know, we do not limit our server testing to the x86 world (see here and here) . So until a POWER8 system arrives, we'll have to check out the available industry standard benchmarks. To that end we looked up the SPEC CPU2006 numbers for a single socket CPU.
The 12 cores inside the POWER8 - the single socket chips found in the more reasonable priced servers - perform very well. The integer performance is only a few percentages lower than the Intel chip and POWER8's floating point performance is well ahead of the Xeon.
Overall the POWER8 is quite capable of keeping up with the Xeon E5-2699v3. And don't let the "2.3 GHz" official clockspeed fool you into thinking that the Xeons are clocked unnecessarily low, either: in SPECint, the XEON is running at 2.8 GHz most of the time.
Ultimately, the POWER8 is able to offer slightly higher raw performance than the Intel CPUs, however it just won't be able to do so at the same performance/watt. Meanwhile the reasonable pricing of the POWER8 chips should result in third party servers that are strongly competitive with the Xeon on a performance-per-dollar basis. Reasonably priced, well performing dual and quad socket Linux on Power servers should be possible very soon.
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Brutalizer - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Again, Hana is a clustered RAM database. And as I have shown above with the Oracle TenTimes RAM database, these are totally different from a normal database. In Memory DataBases can never replace a normal database, as IMDB are optimized for reading data (analysis), not modifying data.Regarding SGI UV300H, it is a 16 socket server, i.e. scale-up server. It is not a huge scale-out cluster. And therefore UV300H might be good for business software, but I dont know the performance of SGI's first(?) scale-up server. Anyway, 16 socket servers are different from SGI UV2000 scale out clusters. And UV2000 can not be used for business software. As evidenced by non existing SAP benchmarks.
ats - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
No, you haven't shown anything. You quote some random whitepaper on the internet like it is gospel and ignore the fact that in memory dbs are used daily as the primary in OLTP, OLAP, BI, etc workloads.And you don't understand that a significant number of the IMDBs are actually designed directly for the OLTP market which is precisely the DB workload that is modifying the most data and is the most complex and demanding with regard to locks and updates.
There is no architecural difference between the UV300 and the UV2k except slightly faster interconnect. And just an fyi, UV300 is like SGI's 30th scale up server. After all, they've been making scale up server for longer than Sun/Oracle.
questionlp - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link
HP Superdome X is a 16-socket x86 server that will probably end up replacing the Itanium-based Superdome if HP can scale the S/X to 32 sockets.Brutalizer - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link
HP will face great difficulties if they try to mod and go beyond 8 sockets on the old Superdome. Heck, even 8 sockets have scaling difficulties on x86.Kevin G - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link
Except that you can you buy a 16 socket Superdome X *today*.http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/getpdf.aspx/4AA5-6149...
The interconnect they're using for the Superdome X is from the old Poulson Itaniums that use QPI which can scale to 64 sockets.
rbanffy - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
You talk "serious business workloads". Of course, there are organizations that use technology that does not scale horizontally, where adding more machines to share the workload does not work because the workload was not designed to be shared. For those, there are solutions that offer progressively less performance per dollar for levels of single-box performance that are unattainable on high-end x86 machines, but that is just because those organizations are limited by the technology they chose.There is nothing in SAP (except its design) or (non-rel) databases that preclude horizontal scaling. It's just that the software was designed in an age when horizontal scaling was not in fashion (even though VAXes have been doing clustering since I was a young boy) and now it's too late to rebuild it from scratch.
mapesdhs - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
Good point, I wonder why they've left it at only 2/core for so long...name99 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
It's not easy to ramp up the number of threads. In particular POWER8 uses something I've never seen any other CPU do --- they have a second tier register file (basically an L2 for registers) and the system dynamically moves data between the two register files as appropriate.It's also much easier for POWER8 to decode 8 instructions per cycle (and to do the multiple branch prediction per cycle to make that happen). Intel could maybe do that if they reverted to a trace cache, but the target codes for this type of CPU are characterized by very large I-footprints and not much tight looping, so trace caches, loop caches, micro-op caches are not that much help. Intel might have to do something like a dual-ported I-cache, and running two fetch streams into two independent sets of 4-wide decoders.
xdrol - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Another register file is just a drop in the ocean. The real problem is the increasing L1/2/.. cache pressure; what can only be mitigated by increasing cache size; what in turn will make your cache access slower, even when you use only one of the SMT threads.Also, you need to have enough unused execution capacity (pipeline ports) for another hardware thread to be useful; the 2 threads in Haswell can already saturate the 7 execution ports with quite high probability, so the extra thread can only run in expense of the other, and due to the cache effects, it's probably faster to just get the 2 tasks executed sequentially (within the same thread). This question could be revisited if the processor has 14 execution port, 2x issue, 2x cache, 2x everything, so it can have 4T/1C, but then it's not really different from 2 normal size cores with 4T..
iAPX - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
It's because this is the same architecture (mainly) that is used on desktop, laptops, and now even mobility!With this market share, I won't be surprised that Intel decided to create a new architecture (x86-64 based) for future server chips, much more specialized, dropping AVX for cloud servers, having 4+ threads per core with simpler decoder and a lot of integer and load/store units!
That might be complemented by a Xeon Phi socketable for floating-point compute intensive tasks and workstations, but it's unclear even if Intel announced it far far ago! ;)