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Very nice analysis. A couple of things stand out: 1. The mesh interconnect looks like a big loser for the smaller parts. It's a big jump up in complexity (ther

Very nice analysis. A couple of things stand out: 1. The mesh interconnect looks like a big loser for the smaller parts. It's a big jump up in complexity (there's an academic paper floating around which describes the guts of an early-stage version) and seems to be a power and performance drain. I can't imagine they got the clock speeds they wanted out of it. Sure, it's probably necessary for the high-core-count SKUs, but the ring bus probably would have done a lot better for the smaller ones. 2. There's almost nothing in here for high-end workstations (which typically have launched with the server parts). Sure, AMD has Threadripper coming soon, but this looks like Intel's full lineup... so where are the parts? We've bought plenty of Xeon E5-1650s and 1660s around here, and it doesn't look like there's anything here to replace them. That's unexpected. The "Gold 5122" (ugh what a silly name) is comparable, but at $1221 is priced just about double what an E5-1650v4 runs. Workstations are a bit of an interesting case because their loads look a lot more like a "gaming desktop" than a server: a few cores loaded most of the time with occasional bursts of high-thread-count loads. That typically favors big caches, fewer cores, and aggressive clock boosting. If you're only running max thread count every now and then, you can afford a huge frequency hit when you do. But since these are business systems we try to avoid anything that doesn't say "Xeon" on it (or "Opteron", in years past) as reliability is paramount. To see nothing here from Intel in this launch is discouraging, to say the least. I have an upgrade budget and it looks like it'll be heading nVidia's way at this point.

slizard 9y ago
> 1. The mesh interconnect looks like a big loser for the smaller parts. It's a big jump up in complexity (there's an academic paper floating around which describes the guts of an early-stage version) and seems to be a power and performance drain. Indeed surprising given that they had a few years to learn from the KNL experience. Got a link to that paper? > I have an upgrade budget and it looks like it'll be heading nVidia's way at this point. Just for curiosity: what workload allows you to go with NVIDIA instead of Intel (rather than AMD)?
- exmadscientist 9y ago
  The mesh is described in a bit more detail in Anandtech's previous article [1]. The figures are directly from the paper they cite [2], which is available on SciHub. I admit to not reading it in detail, only looking at the figures, but I'm amazed that with as many redrivers and repeaters as they have, they can only hit 2.4GHz on the mesh (as quoted on page 7 of this article). That thing has got to be dragging the whole architecture down. > Just for curiosity: what workload allows you to go with NVIDIA instead of Intel (rather than AMD)? The particular workload I'm thinking of is Abaqus FEA. Per-core licensing is a part of that, but it's starved for double-precision (FP64) FLOPS and thus runs great on an appropriate Tesla. We have a number of K40s (which last I looked was the best workstation FP64 Tesla) for that exact reason. And they cost less than a single "Gold 6154" Xeon that the sibling comment (rightly) singles out for good single-thread performance. Throw in Abaqus's horrid per-CPU-core licensing and it's a no-brainer. Intel is just charging too much money for anything launched today to be viable in a workstation. [1]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review-core-i9-7900x-i7-7820x-and-i7-7800x-tested/5 http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-revie... [2]: MoDe-X: Microarchitecture of a Layout-Aware Modular Decoupled Crossbar for On-Chip Interconnects, DOI: 10.1109/TC.2012.203
  - slizard 9y ago
    Thanks for the link. Ugh, per-core licensing is pita. Tell the decision-maker at your work to pay for the cores or switch to some code with more sensible pricing model. Do the alternatives (like Ansys) charge per core as well?
    - exmadscientist 9y ago
      Unfortunately, Abaqus is required for the work we do. According to our senior ME, it has the best contact surface handling and therefore is the only software that's suitable for our types of models. (I don't have much more detail to add, as I don't actually work on our FEA stuff. I just get to advise, as the EE who knows computers inside and out.)
Sephr 9y ago
Looks like the Xeon Gold 6154 will make for a reasonable per-core performance workstation chip. Unfortunately it looks like it probably won't be overclockable though.
onli 9y ago
> 2. There's almost nothing in here for high-end workstations (which typically have launched with the server parts). Sure, AMD has Threadripper coming soon, but this looks like Intel's full lineup... so where are the parts? Wasn't that launched last month with LGA 2066, http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review-core-i9-7900x-i7-7820x-and-i7-7800x-tested http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-revie...? Sure, those do not wear the Xeon name, but that platform has cpus that are comparable to Xeon E5-1650 and 1660s. And there are additional cpus with higher core count announced.
- exmadscientist 9y ago
  That line doesn't support ECC though, so it's a pretty poor choice for a production workstation. And the LGA2066 platform has power delivery and thermal issues [1], likely due to the launch getting pushed up and mainboard vendors not having enough time to get things right. Gaming customers can tolerate a bit of flakiness from their systems, but Intel's enterprise (i.e., Xeon) customers will scream bloody murder if Skylake-SP launches in anywhere near as bad a state as Skylake-X did. [1]: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/-intel-skylake-x-overclocking-thermal-issues,5117.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/-intel-skylake-x-overclo...

slizard 9y ago

> 1. The mesh interconnect looks like a big loser for the smaller parts. It's a big jump up in complexity (there's an academic paper floating around which describes the guts of an early-stage version) and seems to be a power and performance drain. Indeed surprising given that they had a few years to learn from the KNL experience. Got a link to that paper? > I have an upgrade budget and it looks like it'll be heading nVidia's way at this point. Just for curiosity: what workload allows you to go with NVIDIA instead of Intel (rather than AMD)?

exmadscientist 9y ago
The mesh is described in a bit more detail in Anandtech's previous article [1]. The figures are directly from the paper they cite [2], which is available on SciHub. I admit to not reading it in detail, only looking at the figures, but I'm amazed that with as many redrivers and repeaters as they have, they can only hit 2.4GHz on the mesh (as quoted on page 7 of this article). That thing has got to be dragging the whole architecture down. > Just for curiosity: what workload allows you to go with NVIDIA instead of Intel (rather than AMD)? The particular workload I'm thinking of is Abaqus FEA. Per-core licensing is a part of that, but it's starved for double-precision (FP64) FLOPS and thus runs great on an appropriate Tesla. We have a number of K40s (which last I looked was the best workstation FP64 Tesla) for that exact reason. And they cost less than a single "Gold 6154" Xeon that the sibling comment (rightly) singles out for good single-thread performance. Throw in Abaqus's horrid per-CPU-core licensing and it's a no-brainer. Intel is just charging too much money for anything launched today to be viable in a workstation. [1]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review-core-i9-7900x-i7-7820x-and-i7-7800x-tested/5 http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-revie... [2]: MoDe-X: Microarchitecture of a Layout-Aware Modular Decoupled Crossbar for On-Chip Interconnects, DOI: 10.1109/TC.2012.203
- slizard 9y ago
  Thanks for the link. Ugh, per-core licensing is pita. Tell the decision-maker at your work to pay for the cores or switch to some code with more sensible pricing model. Do the alternatives (like Ansys) charge per core as well?
  - exmadscientist 9y ago
    Unfortunately, Abaqus is required for the work we do. According to our senior ME, it has the best contact surface handling and therefore is the only software that's suitable for our types of models. (I don't have much more detail to add, as I don't actually work on our FEA stuff. I just get to advise, as the EE who knows computers inside and out.)

Sephr 9y ago

Looks like the Xeon Gold 6154 will make for a reasonable per-core performance workstation chip. Unfortunately it looks like it probably won't be overclockable though.

onli 9y ago

> 2. There's almost nothing in here for high-end workstations (which typically have launched with the server parts). Sure, AMD has Threadripper coming soon, but this looks like Intel's full lineup... so where are the parts? Wasn't that launched last month with LGA 2066, http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review-core-i9-7900x-i7-7820x-and-i7-7800x-tested http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-revie...? Sure, those do not wear the Xeon name, but that platform has cpus that are comparable to Xeon E5-1650 and 1660s. And there are additional cpus with higher core count announced.

exmadscientist 9y ago
That line doesn't support ECC though, so it's a pretty poor choice for a production workstation. And the LGA2066 platform has power delivery and thermal issues [1], likely due to the launch getting pushed up and mainboard vendors not having enough time to get things right. Gaming customers can tolerate a bit of flakiness from their systems, but Intel's enterprise (i.e., Xeon) customers will scream bloody murder if Skylake-SP launches in anywhere near as bad a state as Skylake-X did. [1]: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/-intel-skylake-x-overclocking-thermal-issues,5117.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/-intel-skylake-x-overclo...