
Intel Xeon E5 v4 Review: Testing Broadwell-EP With Demanding Server Workloads - jseliger
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel-xeon-e5-v4-review
======
late2part
I made a table of certain metrics of the various models.

This is useful for me when comparing ranges of cores, power, price, and maybe
it will be for you too.

I'll filter to my range of options, then make decisions on $/W, $/Ghz, etc..

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PcjgdtSV-2JLJXDpktjg...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PcjgdtSV-2JLJXDpktjg_A8IR9r9tAJMAf8JeNdwmyE/edit?usp=sharing)

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wmf
Here's a fork with an added column that considers total system cost, which
shifts the sweet spot up from 8 to 14-16 cores:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LOLcD0gbSlukcWAFtLYu...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LOLcD0gbSlukcWAFtLYuVxeHOWR5d0dyYNQ2u3vfzHM/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
late2part
I like it!!

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diziet
What's very interesting is that in most cases with either modern PCIe-
connection based SSDs or multiple SSD drives, database performance has become
CPU limited once again in operations that require multiple transactions. These
chips surely help with the higher processor counts.

~~~
jakub_h
Wouldn't SSDs - and even better system-bus-connected storage contraptions -
also drive the use of different algorithms? I can see how merely cutting the
disk latencies by two (or more) orders of magnitude leaves you starved for
computational resources, but you don't have to do many things at that point.
Data packing is different (could be even CPU matched now?), access patterns
can be more random, etc.

~~~
dietrichepp
That's an interesting question, but I expect many of the algorithms will stay
the same. Think of a computer as having a multi-level cache: network -> disk
-> ram -> L2 cache -> L1 cache -> register, each one smaller than the last.
We're seeing a big change in disk latency, but that's only one part of the
chain. For example, we're still going to be optimizing data structures to fit
in L1 cache lines.

~~~
njohnson41
Interestingly, that may be the new ordering if the disks are SSDs, but the
typical seek latency on a spinning disk (~5 ms) is definitely higher than the
latency to read data from another machine's memory across ethernet (a few
hundred us), and even the bandwidths are comparable (~150 MB/s).

So, now it has jumped from (disk -> network -> memory -> ...) to (network ->
disk -> memory -> ...), which is a big change.

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lossolo
Enty level is really nice considering the price per core:

Intel Xeon E5-2630 v4 10/20 2.2 GHz 25 MB 85W $667 US

Intel Xeon E5-2630L v4 10/20 1.8 GHz 25 MB 55W $612 US

Intel Xeon E5-2623 V4 4/8 2.6 GHz 5 MB 85W $444 US

Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 8/16 2.1 GHz 20 MB 85W $417 US

Intel Xeon E5-2609 V4 8/8 1.7 GHz 20 MB 85W $306 US

Intel Xeon E5-2603 v4 6/6 1.7 GHz 10 MB 85W $213 US

~~~
stuartaxelowen
Compared to the 5820K i7, these don't seem much better... Is there something
I'm missing?

[http://ark.intel.com/products/82932/Intel-
Core-i7-5820K-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/82932/Intel-
Core-i7-5820K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz)

~~~
matt_wulfeck
ECC ram and multi-processor support. But yeah I see what you're saying and I
agree.

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elcct
ECC isn't just a gimmick nowadays?

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thrownaway2424
Huh? ECC is necessary for anything but toy applications.

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coldtea
Is it? Or is that the old wives tale? Many very non-toy applications started
on consumer hardware (including Google, and they turned out alright).

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-
ecc/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/)

~~~
thrownaway2424
You'll note that Google grew ECC as soon as they started billing people for
real money. This is no coincidence.

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leonroy
Cool, might finally see an update to Apple's Mac Pro - it's been waiting on
the E5 for quite a while considering the current Mac Pro ships with Intel's
Ivy Bridge architecture!

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imperialdrive
One of those announcements that makes me stop everything and reminisce... This
is simply incredible! I could actually run 100 production Windows servers on
this with my Data-center license... the ROI is insane... thank you Intel!

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EvanAnderson
Be aware that Microsoft is moving to a core-based licensing model for Windows
Server 2016. Microsoft would like a piece of this "ROI", too.

~~~
imperialdrive
Ah I see - good point, and it makes sense. I actually prefer they keep pushing
up pricing on the Server and SQL solutions so that people like me will finally
start seriously considering opensource solutions.

~~~
greggyb
I work for a Microsoft partner and I am involved with their sales processes.
The discussion is never around competing with open source. It's not on their
radar. The majority of the discussion is about replacing Oracle, which is
still dramatically more expensive than SQL Server Enterprise Edition.

~~~
MichaelGG
It's just funny to see MS charging by power of the processor. That's something
they said they would not do, and used to mock Oracle for.

~~~
npunt
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

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merb
We used the E5-2620 series since v1 and now it gets two additional cores for
the same price.

However when it comes to CPU's the price was really good for a while now,
hopefully the prices for SAS drives will soon be as good as CPU's aswell. I
mean computing power is propably cheaper than storage at the moment.

~~~
pbarnes_1
2620's are the ultimate CPU per $ for pretty much all workloads except DB
(where I like 2690's :)

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merb
It depends on your DB workload ;) Actually we sell the 2620 for shared nothing
architectures to all kinds of small to midsize customers.

If you don't need to run fast queries against your analytics or keep logs for
something like 20 years you really won't get too much data. Especially when
the only thing you index are the content of business documents.

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intrasight
I think I still like the Xeon-D better. See this [http://www.cpu-
world.com/Compare/253/Intel_Xeon_D_D-1537_vs_...](http://www.cpu-
world.com/Compare/253/Intel_Xeon_D_D-1537_vs_Intel_Xeon_E5-2620_v4.html)

~~~
late2part
Throw that kit in a SuperMicro MicroBlade Chassis with Dual Node Blades,
kerplow. 56 nodes with 64G RAM, 4TB SSD, and 8 cores per node for ~140W/node.
Banging.

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puppetmaster3
The powerful marketing is the multi core vs clock speed.

Sort of like: buy one get one free (of slower clock speed).

I am impressed. (by the effective marketing deflecting the importance of clock
speed).

~~~
atemerev
I'm sorry, but pure single core performance ended circa 2007. This is the end
of the road.

It is shameful that in 2016 we still don't have, say, parallel rendering in
browsers. All hope is for Servo.

~~~
stuartaxelowen
That is definitely false - single core performance still matters a lot in many
ML applications, where utilizing many (>8) cores is still difficult.

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jakub_h
If by ML, you mean machine learning (and not, e.g., Ocaml et al.), I thought
those people were actually into GPUs.

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stuartaxelowen
GPUs are useful for deep learning and a few other easily parallelizable algos,
but the majority of open source ML software is still stuck in the CPU.

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X-Istence
Fantastic news that they have been released. Means I can get official quotes
for them now!

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mozumder
I have a Skylake E3 Xeon. Why didn't they use the Skylake cores for these E5
CPUs?

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wmf
Because it takes ~2 years to wrap the EP uncore around a new core and validate
the whole thing. Expect Skylake-EP around a year from now.

~~~
mozumder
Are the cores not the same as the Skylake Xeon cores that was released back in
Fall?

(are E3 cores different from E5 cores?)

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wmf
It's more or less the same core (modulo AVX512), but E5 has a much more
complex uncore than E3.

------
wmf
AnandTech's version is probably better for the HN audience:
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel-
xeon-e5-v4-rev...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10158/the-intel-
xeon-e5-v4-review)

~~~
Terribledactyl
I left ars when Jon Stokes did. Learned more about CPUs from his articles than
I did in most of college courses combined.

