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

[phoronix]

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

Unfortunately Intel Corp hadn't sent over any Broadwell-EP hardware earlier this year when launching these new Xeon E5-2600 V5 server processors nor when it came to the high-end consumer Broadwell-E processors. However, I ended up buying a Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP this week for a new system and will be running a variety of upcoming tests...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Upcoming-Broadwell-EP-Tests

[chuckula]

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.

[schmidtbag]

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.

Xeons are all over the place. Some have 6 cores with no HT, some don't have IGPs, some don't have turbo boost, some can overclock, and so on. Then you have models where the same name has been recycled year after year but just has a new version number, which can get a little confusing at times. If anyone thinks Intel's desktop parts have confusing names, nothing compares to Xeon. Though, I'd argue ARM can be more confusing.

[eydee]

1.7GHz? What year is it?

[LinuxID10T]

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

[chuckula]

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

Oh HELL no!

-- AMD's marketing department.

[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.

[cjcox]

Generally speaking, never touch a Xeon less than xx20.

[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.

[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.