
The Intel Xeon E7-8800 v3 Review: The POWER8 Killer? - rbanffy
http://anandtech.com/show/9193/the-xeon-e78800-v3-review
======
brudgers
Me want.

And that's just my born in Computer Shopper Pavlovian response to articles
about new more powerful CPU's. I have no idea what I would do with eight
fifteen core CPU's and six terabytes of RAM other than write checks to Alabama
Power and think of ways to mention it in casual conversations. I mean a 911
Turbo? at least I could use it to pick up hamburger buns.

At a deeper level, I always wonder, what [besides mining bitCoin] would other
people hack up with a monstrous amount of computing power on the order of a
data center in a container?

~~~
kgadek
Depends on what are you doing. For any programmer working on a bigger project,
where compilation time is greater than 2s, (let's say) 4x more power is
superb.

If your code compiles in ~16 seconds, reducing that to 4 would add comfort.

If your code compiles 60 seconds, reducing that to 15 would allow not losing
concentration.

If your code compiles in 60 minutes, reducing that to 15 minutes would
actually allow to do any work on that (not that it's not possible, but it's
really not pleasant).

~~~
Erwin
That's assuming it's sufficiently parallizable. If you only have a single
thread, an ordinary Intel desktop CPU is still faster than any Xeon:
[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html)

I thought about 4-core vs newer 8-core desktop CPUs when upgrading, but
decided that I more often do work on less than 4 cores (with 1 you get the
"Turbo" capacity). The only multi-threaded program is PyCharm which can use up
all those cores when recalculating its static type checking of Python code
(which it seems to do quite excessively).

------
higherpurpose
This reads like a native advertising for Intel. Intel must be worried that
there is something about the new OpenPOWER movement (such as Google and Nvidia
starting to design their own OpenPOWER CPUs) that threatens them, which is why
they are pushing this whole "Intel vs OpenPOWER" narrative now through
"exclusive" articles with certain websites.

In case some people don't get it yet, the way these exclusive indepth pieces
work is not that Anandtech goes to Intel and says "we would like to do an
article about your chips and IBMs'". It's more like Intel going to Anandtech
and saying "we have some great material to give you - would you like to _write
an article around it_?"

And that's how Intel's side of the story gets pushed into the market.

~~~
m_mueller
That's not quite how I read it. Anandtech raises valid concerns about the
power consumption of power8, but other than that they are quite supportive and
show power8 beating these xeons in benchmarks [1]:

> Ultimately, the POWER8 is able to offer slightly higher raw performance than
> the Intel CPUs, however it just won't be able to do so at the same
> performance/watt. Meanwhile the reasonable pricing of the POWER8 chips
> should result in third party servers that are strongly competitive with the
> Xeon on a performance-per-dollar basis.

I think the comparison is fair, however I also have to say that repeating all
the benchmarks in the rest of the article with power8 as well, would have been
better. It seems to me a bit like the power8 comparison was an afterthought.

[1] [http://anandtech.com/show/9193/the-
xeon-e78800-v3-review/7](http://anandtech.com/show/9193/the-
xeon-e78800-v3-review/7)

------
bhouston
Amazon needs to offer these quad-CPU motherboards and with four Intel Xeon E7
8800 v3 so I can start using these 144 core machines in our render farm...

[http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X10...](http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X10QBL.cfm)

~~~
imaginenore
Isn't it more efficient to use their GPU instances for rendering?

~~~
dagw
GPU's still only have a quite small amounts of memory, that greatly limits the
type of work they can do.

~~~
bhouston
High end GPUs can have up to 12GB of ram now, which I have to admit is
starting to get reasonable. Just a few more doublings and you've got what high
end render machines have, which I understand is in the range of 64GB to 128GB.
Although I've heard that some simulation oriented machines have 256GB to
512GB.

------
userbinator
The x86 cores are still internally a lot more CISC-y than POWER cores,
especially with things like uop fusion, so no surprise that they have a higher
IPC.

This caught my attention:
[http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9193/MemoryConfigBiosE7v3.p...](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9193/MemoryConfigBiosE7v3.png)

I wonder whose BIOS that is, or if it's just a simulated screenshot. All the
ones I've seen look a bit nicer:
[http://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2009/08/10133320867l...](http://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2009/08/10133320867l.jpg)

~~~
tw04
Intel writes their own BIOS. That's probably from an Intel reference box.

------
chubot
Can anyone recommend a pre-built server with high end specs like this, which
is more like a turnkey experience? For example, I bought a Dell desktop,
installed Ubuntu on it, and everything just worked (the things that didn't
work were my network).

I guess I want something that distros test on -- I would have said Debian, but
Ubuntu does seem to have better driver support.

Price is not a big consideration; I just want to see what something "easy" is
like and how much it costs.

From page 8, [http://anandtech.com/show/9193/the-
xeon-e78800-v3-review/8](http://anandtech.com/show/9193/the-
xeon-e78800-v3-review/8) :

 _As far as reliability is concerned, while we little reason to doubt that the
quad Xeon OEM systems out there are the pinnacle of reliability, our initial
experience with Xeon E7 v3 has not been as rosy. Our updated and upgraded Quad
Xeon Brickland system was only finally stable after many firmware updates,
with its issues sorted out just a few hours before the launch of the Xeon E7
v3. Unfortunately this means our time testing the stable Xeon E7 v3 was a bit
more limited than we would have liked._

------
roel_v
Some high-end workstations are sold with Xeon CPU's. I had one years ago, and
while overall it 'felt' like a high-quality machine, it didn't really feel
like it was that much better than other machines for software development
(C++).

So, does anyone have experience with today's Xeon based workstations? Are they
worth the 1-2k (or more, if you go crazy...) premium?

~~~
CHY872
It depends what the core is. There are a number of Xeons which are the same
core as their i7 counterparts. In this case, I'm pretty sure you're not buying
anything extra (I think they even cost the same price). You probably had one
of these, if your computer was a standard tower. You get ECC memory, but for
most that's not a huge problem.

This system they're testing is a beast that's designed for enterprise systems;
they're hugely expensive. You're meant to get perhaps 144 hardware threads,
hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage and a price tag of
>$50,000; it's designed for the limits of vertical scaling (and is a job I
imagine it does well).

Even if you were to dump this kind of cash, you'd get terrible performance in
practice due to the design decisions made behind all of this (memory system
will be tuned for throughput not latency, for example) and poor software
support (i.e. an OS like OS X would do a shoddy job of scheduling threads,
especially across NUMA domains. Linux was terrible also until a few years ago,
it wouldn't manage to schedule more than about 30 threads simultaneously no
matter the lad).

I'd go so far as to say that you'd expect better performance from a standard
tower than you would from this.

In general you'd expect a desktop processor to give you about as good
performance as you'd manage to get for developing C++. All of the editing
tools are tuned for desktop processors, and there's not amazing parallelism to
be had with most compilations (and incremental compilations won't see them at
all). Note the benchmarks are for 'total number of kernel compilations' and
not 'time for single compilation' :)

~~~
danieldk
_All of the editing tools are tuned for desktop processors, and there 's not
amazing parallelism to be had with most compilations (and incremental
compilations won't see them at all)._

I regularly run 'make -j32' on a machine, compilation of well-structured
projects is embarrassingly parallel. Incremental compilation is a fair point,
but may not always work in template-heavy codebases that are restricted to
C++03 (no _extern template_ ).

------
CrLf
The thing is, if you're going for a POWER server these days you aren't going
for the overall performance of the machine, you're going for the per-core
performance.

It has been pretty easy to get an x86 box with better total performance than a
POWER box for years. The problem is that you're going to go bankrupt trying to
license all those cores for the kind of software you're getting from IBM and
which is the reason POWER is even in the equation in the first place...

Most IBM software (if not all) is licensed as PVUs (processor value units).
This hurts multi-core machines badly.

~~~
Symmetry
Is it easy to get an x86 that fast? I thought x86 was limited to only 4
sockets, way less than the biggest POWER machines.

~~~
CrLf
When I last checked, IBM sold these x86 servers (I can't recall what the model
line was called) that you could stack and made to behave as a single NUMA box.
These compared very favorably to POWER servers in the same price range (32
cores on x86 vs. 6 cores on POWER7).

I don't remember the maximum scalability of these, but I doubt they would
reach the biggest POWER machines. Problem is: if you need the biggest POWER
machines, you're probably running something that isn't even portable to x86,
so the comparison becomes academic.

------
dragontamer
POWER8 was alive?

I know there are niche markets out there, but I'm still surprised that anyone
would use anything but Intel for the very high end.

~~~
m_mueller
Read the article. Their conclusion is that 24 core power8 systems can beat 36
core Xeons in some important benchmarks, both in performance and power-per-
dollar (but not power-per-watt). If you want to see the reason, just look at
the memory bandwidth - Power8 has about double that of the latest and greatest
Xeon. That's very important, especially for fixed grid computational tasks
(e.g. weather, climate) that traditionally have a very low arithmetic
intensity, i.e. what really counts is the memory bandwidth.

~~~
dragontamer
I did read the article. Power-per-dollar are the smaller 2S Xeons btw. Not the
massive 36-core Xeons.

However, the memory-bandwidth argument makes sense to me. So I'll accept that
as a good reason to go Power8.

~~~
m_mueller
> Power-per-dollar are the smaller 2S Xeons btw. Not the massive 36-core
> Xeons.

Could you give a quote? All I could find about performance-per-dollar was this
excerpt from [1]:

> Ultimately, the POWER8 is able to offer slightly higher raw performance than
> the Intel CPUs, however it just won't be able to do so at the same
> performance/watt. Meanwhile the reasonable pricing of the POWER8 chips
> should result in third party servers that are strongly competitive with the
> Xeon on a performance-per-dollar basis.

This was in conclusion to the E5-vs-Power8 comparison. For some reason they
didn't use E7, however this shouldn't change the outcome, since according to
[2] the E7 is basically the same chip with the same number of cores, just with
a few more features enabled (4 and 8 socket systems possible and support for
more memory). So AFAIK the E5 shouldn't be looked at as a "small" version of
the E7, since taken for itself in isolation for a given benchmark that doesn't
have extremely high memory demand, it should deliver the same performance.
Whether you need an E7 or not should be decided in terms of the architecture
you want to build, not the performance you aim for.

[1][http://anandtech.com/show/9193/the-
xeon-e78800-v3-review/7](http://anandtech.com/show/9193/the-
xeon-e78800-v3-review/7)

[2][http://anandtech.com/show/9193/the-
xeon-e78800-v3-review/3](http://anandtech.com/show/9193/the-
xeon-e78800-v3-review/3)

------
hnlurker
This has got to be the worst written article I've seen all year. I've seen
high school essays written with more skill.

