Intel Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP Linux Benchmarks

The Xeon E5-2609 v4 isn't an exciting performer at all in terms of raw performance... This $300 CPU was beat out in raw performance in a number of tests even by the FX-8370 that costs more than $100 less... The Xeon E3-1220 v5 and other low-end Skylake CPUs also cost less while still tended to perform better too due to their higher clock frequencies. The E5-2609 v5 struggles as its eight cores run at just 1.7GHz and unless the workload is very well threaded, the eight low-clocked cores aren't much good. But at least they are (somewhat) power efficient. Here are the performance-per-Watt numbers compared to the other LGA-2011 v3 CPUs I had available when testing on the MSI X99A WORKSTATION motherboard running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Linux 4.8:

It does better, but even on a performance-per-Watt basis is beat out by higher-end Haswell CPUs.

And a look at the CPU temperature compared to the faster Haswell LGA-2011 v3 CPUs when testing on the same system with the same Phoronix Test Suite workload.

Overall, the E5-2609 v4 isn't very exciting at all. It's only about great if you want an eight-core, low-power system and don't care too much about raw performance but want something cool and quiet. I regret spending $300 on this CPU as for my purposes would have been better off spending a bit more to get a more compelling Broadwell-EP model. After seeing the performance, it was hard enough finding the motivation to even write this brief Linux performance review and frustration I didn't buy a different Broadwell-EP as a wiser investment; the tests where the AMD FX-8370 at less than $200 USD and several years old was better than this Broadwell-EP at $300 was particularly painful to see.

If you want to see how your own system(s) compare, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1608292-LO-INTELAMD234 for a side-by-side comparison to the LGA-2011 v3 numbers or phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1608299-LO-INTELXEON93 for the many CPU benchmarks including the Skylake Xeon reference numbers.