Bulldozer for Servers: Testing AMD's "Interlagos" Opteron 6200 Series
by Johan De Gelas on November 15, 2011 5:09 PM ESTWhat Makes Server Applications Different?
The large caches and high integer core (cluster) count in one Orochi die (four CMT module Bulldozer die) made quite a few people suspect that the Bulldozer design first and foremost was created to excel in server workloads. Reviews like our own AMD FX-8150 launch article have revealed that single-threaded performance has (slightly) regressed compared to the previous AMD CPUs (Istanbul core), while the chip performs better in heavy multi-threaded benchmarks. However, high performance in multi-threaded workstation and desktop applications does not automatically mean that the architecture is server centric.
A more in depth analysis of the Bulldozer architecture and its performance will be presented in a later article as it is out of the scope of this one. However, many of our readers are either hardcore hardware enthusiasts or IT professionals that really love to delve a bit deeper than just benchmarks showing if something is faster/slower than the competition, so it's good to start with an explanation of what makes an architecture better suited for server applications. Is the Bulldozer architecture a “server centric architecture”?
What makes a server application different anyway?
There have been extensive performance characterizations on the SPEC CPU benchmark, which contains real-world HPC (High Performance Computing), workstation, and desktop applications. The studies of commercial web and database workloads on top of real CPUs are less abundant, but we dug up quite a bit of interesting info. In summary we can say that server workloads distinguish themselves from the workstation and desktop ones in the following ways.
They spend a lot more time in the kernel. Accessing the network stack, the disk subsystem, handling the user connections, syncing high amounts of threads, demanding more memory pages for expending caches--server workloads make the OS sweat. Server applications spend about 20 to 60% of their execution time in the kernel or hypervisor, while in contrast most desktop applications rarely exceed 5% kernel time. Kernel code tends to be very low IPC (Instructions Per Clockcycle) with lots of dependencies.
That is why for example SPECjbb, which does not perform any networking and disk access, is a decent CPU benchmark but a pretty bad server benchmark. An interesting fact is that SPECJBB, thanks to the lack of I/O subsystem interaction, typically has an IPC of 0.5-0.9, which is almost twice as high as other server workloads (0.3-0.6), even if those server workloads are not bottlenecked by the storage subsystem.
Another aspect of server applications is that they are prone to more instruction cache misses. Server workloads are more complex than most processing intensive applications. Processing intensive applications like encoders are written in C++ using a few libraries. Server workloads are developed on top of frameworks like .Net and make of lots of DLLs--or in Linux terms, they have more dependencies. Not only is the "most used" instruction footprint a lot larger, dynamically compiled software (such as .Net and Java) tends to make code that is more scattered in the memory space. As a result, server apps have much more L1 instruction cache misses than desktop applications, where instruction cache misses are much lower than data cache misses.
Similar to the above, server apps also have more L2 cache misses. Modern desktop/workstation applications miss the L1 data cache frequently and need the L2 cache too, as their datasets are much larger than the L1 data cache. But once there, few applications have significant L2 cache misses. Most server applications have higher L2 cache misses as they tend to come with even larger memory footprints and huge datasets.
The larger memory footprint and shrinking and expanding caches can cause more TLB misses too. Especially virtualized workloads need large and fast TLBs as they switch between contexts much more often.
As most server applications are easier to multi-thread (for example, a thread for each connection) but are likely to work on the same data (e.g. a relational database), keeping the caches coherent tends to produce much more coherency traffic, and locks are much more frequent.
Some desktop workloads such as compiling and games have much higher branch misprediction ratios than server applications. Server applications tend to be no more branch intensive than your average integer applications.
Quick Summary
The end result is that most server applications have low IPC. Quite a few workstation applications achieve 1.0-2.0 IPC, while many server applications execute 3 to 5 times fewer instructions on average per cycle. Performance is dominated by Memory Level Parallelism (MLP), coherency traffic, and branch prediction in that order, and to a lesser degree integer processing power.
So is "Bulldozer" a server centric architecture? We'll need a more in-depth analysis to answer this question properly, but from a high level perspective, yes, it does appear that way. Getting 16 threads and 32MB of cache inside a 115W TDP power consumption envelope is no easy feat. But let the hardware and benchmarks now speak.
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DigitalFreak - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
Good to see that CPU-Z correctly reports the 6276 as 8 core, 16 thread, instead of falling for AMD's marketing BS.N4g4rok - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
If each module possess two integer cores to a shared floating point core, what's to say that it can't be considered as a practical 16 core?phoenix_rizzen - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
Each module includes 2x integer cores, correct. But the floating point core is "shared-separate", meaning it an be used as two separate 128-bit FPUs or as a single 256 FPU.Thus, each Bulldozer module can run either 3 or 4 threads simultaneously:
- 2x integer + 2x 128-bit FP threads, or
- 2x integer + 1x 256-bit FP threads
It's definitely a dual-core module. It's just that the number of threads it can run is flexible.
The thing to remember, though, is that these are separate hardware pipelines, not mickey-moused hyperthreaded pipelines.
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
You can get into a long discussion about that. The way that I see it, is that part of the core is "logical/virtual", the other part is real in Bulldozer . What is the difference between an SMT thread and CMT thread when they enter the fetch-decode stages? Nothing AFAIK, both instructions are interleaved, and they both have a "thread tag".The difference is when they are scheduled, the instructions enters a real core with only one context in the CMT Bulldozer. With SMT, the instructions enter a real core which still interleave two logical contexts. So the core still consists of two logical cores.
It is gets even more complicated when look at the FP "cores". AFAIK, the FP cores of Interlagos are nothing more than 8 SMT enabled cores.
alpha754293 - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
I think that Johan is partially correct.The way I see it, the FPU on the Interlagos is this:
It's really a 256-bit wide FPU.
It can't really QUITE separate the ONE physical FPUs into two 128-bit wide FPUs, but it more probably in reality, interleaves them (which is really just code for "FPU-starved").
Intel's original HTT had this as a MAJOR problem, because the test back then can range from -30% to +30% performance increase. Floating-point intensive benchmarks have ALWAYS suffered mostly because suppose you're writing a calculator using ONLY 8-byte (64-bit) double precision.
NORMALLY, that should mean that you should be able to crunch through four DWORDs at the same time. And that's kinda/sorta true.
Now, if you are running two programs, really...I don't think that the CPU, the compiler (well..maybe), the OS, or the program knows that it needs to compile for 128-bit-wide FPUs if you're going to run two instances or two (different) calculators.
So it's resource starved in trying to do the calculation processes at the same time.
For non-FPU-heavy workloads, you can get away with that. For pretty much the entire scientific/math/engineering (SME) community; it's an 8-core processor or a highly crippled 16-core processor.
Intel's latest HTT seems to have addressed a lot of that, and in practical terms, you can see upwards of 30% performance advantage even with FPU-heavy workloads.
So in some cases, the definition of core depends on what you're going to be doing with it. For SME/HPC; it's good cuz it can do 12-actual-cores worth of work with 8 FPUs (33% more efficient), but sucks because unless they come out with a 32-thread/16-core monolithic die; as stated, it's only marginally better than the last. It's just cheaper. And going to get incrementally faster with higher clock speeds.
alpha754293 - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
P.S. Also, like Anand's article about nVidia Optimus:Context switching even at the CPU level, while faster, is still costly. Perhaps maybe not nearly as costly as shuffling data around; but it's still pretty costly.
Samus - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Ouch, this is going to be AMD's Itanium. That is, it has architecture adoption problems that people simply won't build around. Maybe less substantial than IA64, but still a huge performance loss because of underutilized integer units.leexgx - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
think they way CPU-z reporting it for BD cpus is correct each core has 2 FP, so 8 cores and 16 threads is correctto bad windows does not understand how to spread the load correctly on an amd cpu (windows 7 with HT cpus Intel works fine, spreads the load correctly, SP1 improves that more but for Intel cpus only)
windows 7 sp1 makes biger use of core parking and gives better cpu use on Intel cpus as i have been seeing on 3 systems most work loads now stay on the first 2 cores and the other 2 stay parked, on amd side its still broke with cool and quite enabled
Stuka87 - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
So, what is your definition of a core?Bulldozers do not utilize hyper threading, which takes a single integer core and can at times put two threads into that single integer core. A Bulldozer core has actual hardware two run two threads at the same time. This would suggest there are two physical cores.
Does it perform like an intel 16 core (if there was such a thing), no. But that does not mean that it is not in fact a 16 core device. As the hardware is there. Yes they share an FPU, but that doesn't mean they are not cores.
Filiprino - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
Actually, Bulldozer is 16 cores. It has two dedicated integer units and a float point unit which can act as two 128 bit units or one 256 bit unit for AVX. So, you can have 2 and 2 per module.Bulldozer does not use hyperthreading.