5 ms·

Passmark has some benchmarks, including the E5 v3s , updated today ... http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus

Passmark has some benchmarks, including the E5 v3s , updated today ... http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html "The King of the Hill" is only 2.3 GHz ?

JamesMcMinn 11y ago
40M Cache, 16 cores, 32 threads in a single CPU. Clockspeed has been mostly irrelevant in terms of CPU benchmarking for a long time now.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Didn't Intel recently juice up their Skylake i7-6700K desktop cpus to 4GHz, though. More cores and more cache has certainly been on the frontiers of pushing the cpu. I'm wondering if they can't resume getting the clock speeds up, too.
  - JamesMcMinn 11y ago
    Higher clock speeds are absolutely still possible, just not in CPUs with high numbers of cores. More cores = more heat, and dealing with heat is one of the biggest challenges when designing a CPU. For servers, doing more things slightly slower is (usually) better than doing fewer things faster, so Intel usually puts core count over clock speed for their Xeon CPUs. For a desktop system that's unlikely to be doing more than 3 or 4 things at once, you can prioritize single core performance and higher clockspeeds. It's also considerably more efficient to have more slower cores than fewer faster cores. Reducing power consumption and reducing heat is a win-win in a datacenter.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Desktop applications tend not to be very optimized for multithreadding, games will still usually use 1-2 cores max which is what those CPUs end up being used mostly for anyhow beyond that professional applications also tend to optimize around 2-4 threads/cores. For the few desktop apps that do scale well 6 and 8 core i7's are available but at those prices you better get a mid range Xeon with a desktop socket since it's unlikely you'll be overclocking your cpu in that case anyhow.
    - sorenjan 11y ago
      Intel will release the Core i7-6950X later this year. It has ten cores and will apparently cost around $1500. Not sure which use case except one-uppance and bragging they're targeting, but it will probably fly with the right workload. Video encoding and 3D rendering are the only things I can think of that will scale easy to that kind of CPU, although you'd think people with those needs would buy Xeons.
      - dogma1138 11y ago
        Well the "X" (Well technically E as in Broadwell-E, Haswell-E etc.) is part of their Extreme line it's meant for "enthusiasts" that really like dumping money on high end CPU's and overclocking the hell out of them this isn't a workhorse, at that price you can build a full dual socket Xeon for about the same price as the CPU (if indeed it will be 1500$, I'm betting on more like a 1000$ like their previous top of the line Extreme series). Video Encoding isn't that well multi-threaded either as it's some what linearly dependent (you can't just encode random frames without having the previous frames/key frames done for references which means you can usually do 2-4 frames at the time so run off becomes and issue when you have more cores than frames to encode), 3D rendering is also a mixed bag depending on what type of raster and post processing you use you will get substantially different scaling between number of threads vs pure clock speeds. In any case video encoding and 3D rendering (at least the ones that one will do on a desktop) will benefit much more from multiple high end GPU's than from an increase in CPU cores, the more or less conversion is that GPU numbers give almost 1 to 1 scaling where additional CPU's (cores) give you 0.3-0.5 on average in the best case scenarios (there are a few cases where CPU scales almost as well as GPU but they aren't that common).
- sorenjan 11y ago
  That depends on your use case. Intel Xeon E5-2602 V4 is rumored to be clocked at 5.1 GHz, with four cores.
nextos 11y ago
But with turbo it clocks at 3.6 GHz. Plus it has 16 cores.
- rosser 11y ago
  Isn't "turbo" in Intel's multi-core parlance the all-out speed a single core can achieve? If more than one core is maxed, they both run at a reduced "turbo" speed, dependent on how many more than one are maxed, right?
  - devicenull 11y ago
    AFAIK, it depends on TDP. So, yea, you won't get all of them running at max turbo. (Even if you did, they could still be running at a lower p-state and just reporting a higher frequency. Frequency and performance aren't really the same thing anymore)
  - slizard 11y ago
    The Boost-ed frequency depends on multiple factors, including the number of cores used, power consumption, current, temperature and even the type of instructions executed (e.g. AVX instructions trigger a drop in frequency on Xeon cores, not sure about Xeon D, though). The boost levels are typically defined as "bins", i.e. the max clock if 1, 2, 3, etc. cores are active. Can't find Xeon-specific info, but this page shows some general information on the topic: https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/processors/000005523.html https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/processo...
biot 11y ago
The article explains why: What one will see, very quickly, is that the new SKUs generally offer slightly lower clock speeds to maintain a 45w TDP. Maintaining this figure while adding 50% to 100% more cores and cache is no small feat and it makes sense that clock speeds suffer. We also see the TDP figures rise to 65w in order to accommodate more cores and higher clock speeds. We introduced the Core * Base GHz and Thread * Base GHz figures just to show how much of an improvement this is. The new chips represent double the cores but up to about 62% more clock cycles in aggregate over what we had as the previous fastest chip, the Intel Xeon D-1541. We also now, in the same TDP figure, have 23% more raw compute.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  With the "23% more raw compute" figure, say I've got a program running on an older system - do I need to recompile that binary (with new optimisations / assembly instructions) to see that improvement or is that an improvement in efficiency for existing instructions?
  - cbhl 11y ago
    If your program is single-threaded, it will run slower. If it parallelizes well (e.g. ray tracing) then you will see that improvement.
- gleenn 11y ago
  Given that power consumption is related to the square of the clockspeed, generally small reductions mean relatively big power and heat savings. Respect for them anyways, I'm sure it wasn't a cakewalk either.
Sanddancer 11y ago
The trend lately has been wide, not tall. Lots of pipelines mean that a stall in any one isn't going to affect overall performance too much, even if those individual pipelines aren't quite as fast. The trend is going to be continuing into the future, too -- the E5 v4 Xeons, which are supposed to be released Any Week Now, are going to be topping out at 22 cores per processor.
bigtones 11y ago
E5 v3 CPU's are old, and the Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 at the top of their charts was released back in Q2 2014 - nearly 2 years ago. The new Intel Xeon E5-2698 v4 when it is released should blitz that.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  "Leaks" say its going to have a 3.6GHz boost clock. [ http://wccftech.com/intel-broadwellep-xeon-e52600-v4-skus-leaked/ http://wccftech.com/intel-broadwellep-xeon-e52600-v4-skus-le... ] Do you know what this is about?
to3m 11y ago
There's a single thread score you can see by clicking each link. (I don't know what this measures, though. It seems to be about 1,900 to 2,100 for the newer chips - even the one in my laptop. The score doesn't vary us much as the clock speed, though clock speed seems to be a factor.)

JamesMcMinn 11y ago

40M Cache, 16 cores, 32 threads in a single CPU. Clockspeed has been mostly irrelevant in terms of CPU benchmarking for a long time now.

tosseraccount 11y ago
Didn't Intel recently juice up their Skylake i7-6700K desktop cpus to 4GHz, though. More cores and more cache has certainly been on the frontiers of pushing the cpu. I'm wondering if they can't resume getting the clock speeds up, too.
- JamesMcMinn 11y ago
  Higher clock speeds are absolutely still possible, just not in CPUs with high numbers of cores. More cores = more heat, and dealing with heat is one of the biggest challenges when designing a CPU. For servers, doing more things slightly slower is (usually) better than doing fewer things faster, so Intel usually puts core count over clock speed for their Xeon CPUs. For a desktop system that's unlikely to be doing more than 3 or 4 things at once, you can prioritize single core performance and higher clockspeeds. It's also considerably more efficient to have more slower cores than fewer faster cores. Reducing power consumption and reducing heat is a win-win in a datacenter.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Desktop applications tend not to be very optimized for multithreadding, games will still usually use 1-2 cores max which is what those CPUs end up being used mostly for anyhow beyond that professional applications also tend to optimize around 2-4 threads/cores. For the few desktop apps that do scale well 6 and 8 core i7's are available but at those prices you better get a mid range Xeon with a desktop socket since it's unlikely you'll be overclocking your cpu in that case anyhow.
  - sorenjan 11y ago
    Intel will release the Core i7-6950X later this year. It has ten cores and will apparently cost around $1500. Not sure which use case except one-uppance and bragging they're targeting, but it will probably fly with the right workload. Video encoding and 3D rendering are the only things I can think of that will scale easy to that kind of CPU, although you'd think people with those needs would buy Xeons.
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      Well the "X" (Well technically E as in Broadwell-E, Haswell-E etc.) is part of their Extreme line it's meant for "enthusiasts" that really like dumping money on high end CPU's and overclocking the hell out of them this isn't a workhorse, at that price you can build a full dual socket Xeon for about the same price as the CPU (if indeed it will be 1500$, I'm betting on more like a 1000$ like their previous top of the line Extreme series). Video Encoding isn't that well multi-threaded either as it's some what linearly dependent (you can't just encode random frames without having the previous frames/key frames done for references which means you can usually do 2-4 frames at the time so run off becomes and issue when you have more cores than frames to encode), 3D rendering is also a mixed bag depending on what type of raster and post processing you use you will get substantially different scaling between number of threads vs pure clock speeds. In any case video encoding and 3D rendering (at least the ones that one will do on a desktop) will benefit much more from multiple high end GPU's than from an increase in CPU cores, the more or less conversion is that GPU numbers give almost 1 to 1 scaling where additional CPU's (cores) give you 0.3-0.5 on average in the best case scenarios (there are a few cases where CPU scales almost as well as GPU but they aren't that common).
sorenjan 11y ago
That depends on your use case. Intel Xeon E5-2602 V4 is rumored to be clocked at 5.1 GHz, with four cores.

nextos 11y ago

But with turbo it clocks at 3.6 GHz. Plus it has 16 cores.

rosser 11y ago
Isn't "turbo" in Intel's multi-core parlance the all-out speed a single core can achieve? If more than one core is maxed, they both run at a reduced "turbo" speed, dependent on how many more than one are maxed, right?
- devicenull 11y ago
  AFAIK, it depends on TDP. So, yea, you won't get all of them running at max turbo. (Even if you did, they could still be running at a lower p-state and just reporting a higher frequency. Frequency and performance aren't really the same thing anymore)
- slizard 11y ago
  The Boost-ed frequency depends on multiple factors, including the number of cores used, power consumption, current, temperature and even the type of instructions executed (e.g. AVX instructions trigger a drop in frequency on Xeon cores, not sure about Xeon D, though). The boost levels are typically defined as "bins", i.e. the max clock if 1, 2, 3, etc. cores are active. Can't find Xeon-specific info, but this page shows some general information on the topic: https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/processors/000005523.html https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/processo...

biot 11y ago

The article explains why: What one will see, very quickly, is that the new SKUs generally offer slightly lower clock speeds to maintain a 45w TDP. Maintaining this figure while adding 50% to 100% more cores and cache is no small feat and it makes sense that clock speeds suffer. We also see the TDP figures rise to 65w in order to accommodate more cores and higher clock speeds. We introduced the Core * Base GHz and Thread * Base GHz figures just to show how much of an improvement this is. The new chips represent double the cores but up to about 62% more clock cycles in aggregate over what we had as the previous fastest chip, the Intel Xeon D-1541. We also now, in the same TDP figure, have 23% more raw compute.

voltagex_ 11y ago
With the "23% more raw compute" figure, say I've got a program running on an older system - do I need to recompile that binary (with new optimisations / assembly instructions) to see that improvement or is that an improvement in efficiency for existing instructions?
- cbhl 11y ago
  If your program is single-threaded, it will run slower. If it parallelizes well (e.g. ray tracing) then you will see that improvement.
gleenn 11y ago
Given that power consumption is related to the square of the clockspeed, generally small reductions mean relatively big power and heat savings. Respect for them anyways, I'm sure it wasn't a cakewalk either.

Sanddancer 11y ago

The trend lately has been wide, not tall. Lots of pipelines mean that a stall in any one isn't going to affect overall performance too much, even if those individual pipelines aren't quite as fast. The trend is going to be continuing into the future, too -- the E5 v4 Xeons, which are supposed to be released Any Week Now, are going to be topping out at 22 cores per processor.

bigtones 11y ago

E5 v3 CPU's are old, and the Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 at the top of their charts was released back in Q2 2014 - nearly 2 years ago. The new Intel Xeon E5-2698 v4 when it is released should blitz that.

tosseraccount 11y ago
"Leaks" say its going to have a 3.6GHz boost clock. [ http://wccftech.com/intel-broadwellep-xeon-e52600-v4-skus-leaked/ http://wccftech.com/intel-broadwellep-xeon-e52600-v4-skus-le... ] Do you know what this is about?

to3m 11y ago

There's a single thread score you can see by clicking each link. (I don't know what this measures, though. It seems to be about 1,900 to 2,100 for the newer chips - even the one in my laptop. The score doesn't vary us much as the clock speed, though clock speed seems to be a factor.)