
Intel Xeon E5 v3: Up to 18 Haswell EP Cores - wmf
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8423/intel-xeon-e5-version-3-up-to-18-haswell-ep-cores-
======
jwise0
The thing that's truly amazing to me is that they're pumping out a 662mm^2
(about 2.6cm square) chip on their leading-edge production process, and
selling the full-SKU for "only" $4,000. By comparison, the very first Ivy
Bridge parts were about 160mm^2 and were sold into a consumer (i.e., lower-
margin, more cost-sensitive) space for about $330; scaling defects
quadratically (though this is just a gross estimation), you'd predict this
part (if in a /consumer/ space) to go for around $5650.

Add in the small volume cost of having to sell this thing into the server
market, the price point they're putting their 'reticle buster' at is
astounding. They must have really tuned their 22nm process as it's matured...
the rest of the industry would kill for that kind of process :-)

~~~
reitzensteinm
Their ability to sell parts with defective cores fused off makes this analysis
really quite complicated.

Ad absurdum, say only 1% the 18 core dies have no defects and can be sold as
such. In a vacuum, the chip would have be priced very high to cover the costs
of low yields.

But since they can sell the defects at 8 cores for $1000 and 12 cores for
$2000, they can be profitable on the reject chips alone. The 18 cores that
work are a bonus.

They're no doubt priced at what Intel thinks the market will bare, meaning
that either the process is great (so they're priced low to sell a ton), or
that there's just not that much demand for the most high end product. Or some
combination of the two.

~~~
masklinn
I'm not sure how it works out for these chips, but I remember stories a few
years ago where the fabs were so high quality they didn't have enough
defective chips to put in the lower bin, and had to bin "perfect" chips to
reach target volumes.

~~~
donavanm
The first few spins of AMD Athlons circa 1999/2000 were exceptional in this
regard. Parts actually binned at 700mhz were downclocked and sold in 500mhz
packages. I dont recall anything similar with Intel recently, maybe some if
the core2 stuff.

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bashinator
Die shot.

[http://www.intel.com/newsroom/kits/xeon/e5v3/gallery/images/...](http://www.intel.com/newsroom/kits/xeon/e5v3/gallery/images/E5-2600_v3_1.jpg)

~~~
ars
Anyone know (or can guess) why they mirrored the cpu's on the right edge?

~~~
wmf
It has to do with how the cores connect to the rings, which probably run over
the L3s. Each core "faces" one of the L3 slices and it looks like each L3
slice has a ring stop in the middle.

------
twotwotwo
Tangible example from p14 ([http://www.anandtech.com/show/8423/intel-
xeon-e5-version-3-u...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8423/intel-
xeon-e5-version-3-up-to-18-haswell-ep-cores-/14)): looks like it can do a
kernel compile in under 3 minutes in a two-socket config.

~~~
pantalaimon
The i7-5960X compiles the kernel in 42s

[http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1409087-LI-
COREI759667](http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1409087-LI-COREI759667)

~~~
runeks
FWIW, the AMD FX-8320 (8 cores) is around half as fast as the i7-5960X, but
costs one seventh of the Intel CPU ($150 vs $1050).

------
abruzzi
this is why core based licensing frustrates me. When I license Oracle (11g)
the real way to get speed increases is to let it spread out over multiple
cores, but that gets expensive given Oracles licensing terms, and even finding
single or dual core systems is get hard.

~~~
rdtsc
What would you use as a proxy to get extract as much revenue as possible?
Server memory size? Max database size mabe. Or get silly and the amount of
datatypes you can use. (For $10k more you can use floats in your columns) and
so on.

Core licensing is purely a price differentiator to get as much money as
possible. The idea is that those willing to shell out money for 64 cores for
their servers will be willing to shell out 20x or similar than those with 2
cores.

~~~
wmf
_What would you use as a proxy to get extract as much revenue as possible?_

That's the key. Complaints about core-based licensing aren't really about
core-based licensing but about the very concept of value-based licensing (aka
extract as much revenue as possible).

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userbinator
I wonder what the rationale for _18_ cores was, since it's a rather unusual
number of cores and not a round number - 16 would be the usual choice. Was it
just "we can put two more on the die, so let's do that"?

~~~
sprachspiel
Well, the biggest Ivy Bridge EX has 15 cores! There's speculation that the 18
core Haswell-EPs are actually Haswell-EX dies that Intel wants to get rid as
fast as possible because these chips have buggy TSX (transactional memory).

------
lsiebert
So didn't they find an issue with haswell cores (and the early next
generation, broadwell) that meant they had to issue an erratum to disable TSX
instructions?

I'd wait until the Haswell-EX or Broadwell-E/EP chips.

------
ck2
Well that is one way to solve the performance hit when using dual physical
cpus

(socket contention because of cache-to-cache traffic going through QPI)

presentation on the problem
[http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/...](http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/linuxcon-2014-locking-
final.pdf)

------
trhway
"Cluster On Die can be understood as if you split the CPU and LLC into two
parts that behave like two CPUs in NUMA. The OS is presented two affinity
domains. "

Those Who Are About To Die ... err ... write kernel scheduler We Salute You

~~~
wmf
Nah. What I like about this feature is that it requires no new OS support
because it's just NUMA and OSes already support NUMA. This feature should
benefit clouds that are already dividing servers into shared-nothing domains.

------
jgalt212
Ah, the promise of Clojure and easy parallel programming is near at hand. At
what number of cores, does Clojure become a lay-up choice over other hard to
parallel languages? Anyone care to opine?

~~~
signa11
> Ah, the promise of Clojure and easy parallel programming is near at hand.

clojure, golang and before all that erlang as well (and myriads of libraries
e.g. cilk etc). dearth of parallel languages have never really been the issue,
imho.

<the 'opine' part>

it's _how_ to move _existing_ applications to new h/w, with the caveat that
doing a flat out re-write is almost out of question. hoping that there will
eventually be compiler that can just parallelize your application code, is
just a pipe dream, imho.

~~~
ansgri
I often find (in my own code as well) that nobody ever remembers OpenMP. It
has some overhead, but it's not that big even without fixed thread count
tuning (with which it nearly vanishes). Not automatic, but damn close.

------
cowsandmilk
Who is selling systems with them today? or soon?

~~~
wmf
Everyone: Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo (still separate), Supermicro, etc.

------
spindritf
Did you guys not like Anand? The moment he quit the site, it's showing up on
HN every day. Or have I just started noticing it?

I'm guessing VPS/cloud providers will like this one. You can already pack a
lot of memory and SSD drives into a server so CPU was becoming a bit of a
bottleneck.

~~~
christoph
I'm not sure why you're being down voted as I have noticed this as well and
thought the exact same thing regarding anandtech article frequency increasing
since he left, when I logged on to HN this morning.

~~~
petercooper
Call me a cynic, but I suspect many people browse/monitor certain sites for
things that might do well on HN.. and the recent outpouring of love for Anand
might have put the site on their radars.

~~~
jacquesm
Except Wesleys previous submission was 58 days ago so he's not exactly a mass
submitter.

That doesn't invalidate your theory, but I don't think it applies to this
particular submission.

~~~
petercooper
Oh absolutely, I want to make it clear I didn't intend to insinuate on any
particular person, more a trend I've seen on HN over the years.

I've seen it a few times before when $wellKnownProgrammer has an article hit
the top of HN, then their next several blog posts all seem to hit the front
page before everyone fatigues of it. I'm guessing certain people and sites
become "flavors of the month" for both submitters and upvoters, but maybe HN
has the stats to figure it out.

~~~
gareim
Are you sure you're not the one that's experiencing the Baader-Meinhof
phenomenon? I subscribe to Anandtech's RSS feeds and they had a slower period
recently for technical articles.

