Intel Xeon Silver 4108 + Tyan Tempest HX S7100

If you wish to see how your own Linux servers/workstations compare to the systems tested in this article today, it's simply a matter of installing the Phoronix Test Suite and running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1710129-AL-XEONSILVE43.

There are also some additional results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file of exclusively the Intel Xeon Silver 4108 + Tyan Tempest HX S7100 and just a phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1710120-AL-INTELXEON05 away. Likewise, there's also this much larger result file for those craving a lot of data.

The performance of the Xeon Silver 4108 is basically in line with expectations for its eight core / sixteen thread design that has just a 85 Watt TDP as a result of a 1.8GHz base frequency with 3.0GHz turbo. In terms of the overall AC system power consumption, some additional benchmarks were run of the Xeon Silver + S7100 combination under a variety of workloads:

All of the workload details and per-test metrics can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. The total AC system power draw was a minimum of just 57 Watts, an average power draw under load of 80 Watts, and a peak of 96 Watts. Not bad at all for an eight core / sixteen thread workstation! The Phoronix Test Suite was interfacing with a WattsUp Pro for reading the AC power use.

Meanwhile, the CPU temperature with the 2U-sized LGA-3647 heatsink and dynamic fan control in the BIOS came down to a low of 25°C, average of 32°C, and a peak of 38°C. Nice and cool considering the workloads included compiling the Linux kernel, compiling GCC, x264 encoding, FFmpeg encoding, etc. During none of this testing with the 2U-sized heatsink and in the Rosewill 4U EATX chassis were there any thermal problems or any throttling reported via dmesg.

Overall the Tyan Tempest HX S7100 (S7100AG2NR) motherboard has been working out very well in our testing thus far. There's been no Linux issues to report (BSD tests are forthcoming), its quite capable with the number of PCI Express slots, SATA/SAS ports, dual NVMe M.2 slots, and handling up to two Xeon Scalable processors. It's yet another example of the great TYAN quality we've come to enjoy over the years.

Stay tuned for more Linux EPYC/Xeon benchmarks at Phoronix. Thanks to Tyan for providing the S7100AG2NR review unit. If you have any interesting test/benchmark requests for future articles, be sure to let us know.