Intel Atom C3950 + Tyan Tempest S3227

In my testing of the Tyan Tempest S3227 with Atom C3950 since the start of the year, it's been running very well under Linux with most testing to date having been with Ubuntu 17.10. For the test configuration I was using 2 x 4GB DDR4-2400 Crucial 9ASF51272AZ-2G3B1 ECC modules and a 240GB OCZARC100 SATA 3.0 SSD. The testing was done with the Linux 4.15 kernel for getting an idea of the Spectre/Meltdown impact accounted for in the results. This sixteen-core Atom server was running within a 2U chassis with basic cooling.

First up I was curious to see how warm this configuration would get in the 2U chassis with just two 80mm intake fans and using the Tyan stock passive heatsink on the C3950.

In the most demanding multi-threaded benchmarks, the C3950 got up to 82C, but the average temperature was only 54C and it bottomed out when not under load at 36C. Not bad at all, the most demanding work where the CPU cores were fully-loaded didn't lead to any stability problems nor any reported thermal throttling via dmesg. The system was working out fine throughout all of the testing. Obviously if you are concerned about higher temps, you can add additional fans, etc.

Using a WattsUp Pro power meter interfacing with the Phoronix Test Suite, the AC power consumption was being recorded through a variety of benchmarks. The total AC system power consumption had a minimum of 28 Watts, an average power draw under load of 37 Watts, and a peak of 50 Watts.

Those curious about the power usage or thermal conditions under the particular benchmarks run, via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file you can see all of the individual results.

Additionally there are more CPU thermal results for this C3950 + Tyan S3227 setup via this extra result file for those interested. With that separate set of benchmarks conducted at a completely separate time, the Atom C3950 had an average temperature under load of 53C with a peak of 73C in the most demanding benchmarks utilizing all sixteen cores.