Upcoming Linux Tests With A $300 Broadwell-EP Xeon CPU

[torsionbar28]

That's like asking why someone should buy a GPU with a clock of 1GHz and a couple thousand stream processors instead of a quad core CPU at 4GHz. Different workloads demand different specs. This is a Xeon; it's not meant to run the average desktop PC application. Why do you think ARM is getting so popular in the server market? Most ARM processors are clocked below 2GHz. They're ideal for tasks that aren't all that complex or time sensitive. Having 8 cores at 1.7GHz is more energy efficient for something like cloud hosting than 4 cores at 3.7GHz. It could also offer better performance; running tasks slowly in parallel can, at times, be faster than quickly running tasks in serial.

^ All of this, plus server tasks tend to be inherently parallelized (one server serves multiple clients simultaneously) so more slower cores will give better performance than fewer faster cores. Desktop peecee workloads tend to be the exact opposite, single threaded applications, so on the desktop, fewer cores at higher clock will yield better performance than more cores at lower clock. It's all about choosing the right tool for the job. One size does not fit all.

[schmidtbag]

What I don't understand is why these newer chips keep coming out and the clock speed is so low. 1.7 Ghz?

Anyone care to explain why this is better then a cheaper processor with a higher clock speed with the same core count?

That's like asking why someone should buy a GPU with a clock of 1GHz and a couple thousand stream processors instead of a quad core CPU at 4GHz. Different workloads demand different specs. This is a Xeon; it's not meant to run the average desktop PC application. Why do you think ARM is getting so popular in the server market? Most ARM processors are clocked below 2GHz. They're ideal for tasks that aren't all that complex or time sensitive. Having 8 cores at 1.7GHz is more energy efficient for something like cloud hosting than 4 cores at 3.7GHz. It could also offer better performance; running tasks slowly in parallel can, at times, be faster than quickly running tasks in serial.

[Goddard]

What I don't understand is why these newer chips keep coming out and the clock speed is so low. 1.7 Ghz?

Anyone care to explain why this is better then a cheaper processor with a higher clock speed with the same core count?

[schmidtbag]

1.7GHz? What year is it?

I'm not really sure what that's supposed to imply... There are plenty of modern mobile and server parts at or around 1.7GHz. This part isn't all that unusual.

This begs for a comparison with an AMD FX-8320E if you have one...

Not really. This is much more comparable to the Opteron 6128, and even then, that's not really a good comparison.

[mczak]

That's a very interesting test chip. I noticed that it is 1.7GHz and no turbo boost, but the ARK site lists it as an 85 watt TDP part. I'd be curious to see some power consumption testing with the benchmarks since I'm willing to bet that in real-world tests you'll see some pretty low power consumption numbers at those clock speeds.

If you compare it to a desktop platform cpu, it probably doesn't look all that great. For about the same price and with nearly the same TDP, you can get a skylake i7-6700k. Sure it only has half the cores, but more than twice the clock easily make up for that. And platform power of X99 based boards is generally quite a bit higher than the "ordinary" desktop boards (though it could be more efficient at full load - since intel also sells 10-core, 2.2Ghz Broadwell-EPs using 85W or even more pricey options such as 65W ones with 1.7Ghz and 14 cores (!), I suspect this one isn't going to actually need all of its TDP budget - though the skylake i7 tdp budget also includes the IGP, so it shouldn't use all of it neither with just the cpu cores active).
Of course, with Broadwell-EP you get way more L3 cache, more memory bandwidth (as well as potentially much more memory), more pcie links and whatnot. But in the pure cpu processing department, these low end Broadwell-EPs don't really cut it.

[cjcox]

Generally speaking, never touch a Xeon less than xx20.

[torsionbar28]

1.7GHz? What year is it?

How else do you think 8 full cores, 20 MB of cache, 2 QPI links, and 40 lanes of PCI-E 3.0 are going to fit inside of 85w TDP and $306? Sure, you can buy essentially the same chip but at 3.2 Ghz and 135w TDP in the E5-2667..... if you have $2k to spend.

[chuckula]

This begs for a comparison with an AMD FX-8320E if you have one...

Oh HELL no!

-- AMD's marketing department.

[LinuxID10T]

This begs for a comparison with an AMD FX-8320E if you have one...

[eydee]

1.7GHz? What year is it?