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- Intel Xeon provides the best performance. - Power consumption of Intel systems at off, idle and full power states are less then of ARM64 and POWER8 ones - A

- Intel Xeon provides the best performance. - Power consumption of Intel systems at off, idle and full power states are less then of ARM64 and POWER8 ones - ARM 64-bit and Power 8 are currently providing a significantly lower performance / Watt than Intel Damn.

TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
Best performance for non memory-bandwidth-limited problems, yes. For memory-bandwidth-limited problems (such as you often see with HPC), power8 looks better.
zurn 12y ago
Note this is only about the specific configurations they tested and not necessarily about hte architectures in general (eg POWER8 is represented by 3 GHz chips here, they go up to 4+ GHz).
userbinator 12y ago
"at off, idle and full power states are less" Xeons consume less power even when off...? Am I not parsing this sentence correctly?
- AnonNo15 12y ago
  Chassis power consumption with system(s) off: Xeon: 0W OpenPOWER: 11W HP Moonshot (Avoton): 121W HP Moonshot (ARM): 218W This is mostly due to chassis specifics, though.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    That is so amazingly high that I think something isn't right - I wonder what's consuming so much power. 100W+ is like a whole CPU at full load. Then again, servers are not usually turned off so perhaps they just kept all the CPUs powered up but in a halted state...
    - Sanddancer 12y ago
      Most likely, it's everything else on the motherboard. Think things like the IPMI chipset, which tends to be on all the time. If the boards have SFP+ transceivers, those may very well use a few watts waiting for Wake on Lan packets. Certain SCSI controllers will have their own Out of Band management chips that use a few watts. Then you have a fan spinning slowly to keep the power supply cool for handling all those parts at idle. Servers tend to have lots of bits and pieces that like being on all the time, so even when shut down, the motherboard still tends to be a hive of activity.
    - timthorn 12y ago
      Bear in mind that the Moonshot chassis also contains one or two, potentially 10GbE, switches.
      - lvalsan 12y ago
        The tested Intel Xeon E3-1285L v3 (Haswell) and the IBM Power 8 systems are single mainboard systems. The Intel C2750 (Avoton) and the ARM 64-bit Applied Micro X-Gene 1 are cartridges inside an HP Moonshot chassis. All tested systems are fitted with a BMC. In addition the HP Moonshot chassis also have an internal network switch, uplink module, internal network fabric, chassis fans, chassis manager module, etc. The Intel Avoton chassis is having a 1 GbE internal network fabric and switch with a 6x SFP+ 10 GbE uplink module (one port used) while the ARM 64-bit X-Gene 1 chassis is having a 10 GbE internal network fabric and switch with a 4x QSFP+ uplink module (one port used). The purpose of the off power measurements is to see how much power the chassis infrastructure is drawing. The power consumption of the Intel Xeon E3-1285L v3 (Haswell) chassis with the system off is very low, below the threshold of the Racktivity smart metered PDU used to perform the power measurements. The PDU reports 0, but the real power consumption is in the order of a few Watts. The tested Power 8 processor is inside a Tyan reference system GN70-BP010. Being a reference system, not all components and firmwares have been fully optimised. In the mean time Tyan has launched the TN71-BP012 platform which is not a reference system and should be much more optimised and ready for production use. I would be curious to see what are the improvements, but I don't have any at hand for now.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
ksec 12y ago
I think Power 8 and the ARM are still on older Gen node. Xeon is on 22nm, with the latest Xeon on 14nm Broadwell. So Intel wins on Fabs Tech. And this will not change for another 5 years.
- exDM69 12y ago
  Semiconductor fabs competing with Intel are a bit behind but that's not the issue here, they were using a 40nm ARM chip but there are 28nm and 20nm fabs available.
- lvalsan 12y ago
  The Intel chips (Xeon E3-1285L v3 - Haswell and Atom C2750 - Avoton) are both built on 22 nm. The Power 8 processor is using the same process size as the Intel parts, 22 nm. The ARM 64-bit Applied Micro X-Gene 1 SoC tested is on 40 nm. X-Gene 2 is on 28 nm and X-Gene 3 will be build using a 16 nm process. X-Gene 2 is apparently sampling now but we didn't get access to it yet, nor have we seen any publicly available platform using it. Once we'll get access (which should happen soon) to Xeon-D (Broadwell-DE) using a 14 nm process size, the results will be added to the repository at http://lvalsan.web.cern.ch/lvalsan/processor_benchmarking/ http://lvalsan.web.cern.ch/lvalsan/processor_benchmarking/
exDM69 12y ago
Yes, I was disappointed too but... The AArch64 chip used was a 40nm chip. The Intel chips it was up against are 20nm (or as low as 14nm). This has enormous power implications, and given that they're pretty close in power consumption with a huge difference in the fab process, Aarch64 is a strong contender as an architecture.

TheLoneWolfling 12y ago

Best performance for non memory-bandwidth-limited problems, yes. For memory-bandwidth-limited problems (such as you often see with HPC), power8 looks better.

zurn 12y ago

Note this is only about the specific configurations they tested and not necessarily about hte architectures in general (eg POWER8 is represented by 3 GHz chips here, they go up to 4+ GHz).

userbinator 12y ago

"at off, idle and full power states are less" Xeons consume less power even when off...? Am I not parsing this sentence correctly?

AnonNo15 12y ago
Chassis power consumption with system(s) off: Xeon: 0W OpenPOWER: 11W HP Moonshot (Avoton): 121W HP Moonshot (ARM): 218W This is mostly due to chassis specifics, though.
- userbinator 12y ago
  That is so amazingly high that I think something isn't right - I wonder what's consuming so much power. 100W+ is like a whole CPU at full load. Then again, servers are not usually turned off so perhaps they just kept all the CPUs powered up but in a halted state...
  - Sanddancer 12y ago
    Most likely, it's everything else on the motherboard. Think things like the IPMI chipset, which tends to be on all the time. If the boards have SFP+ transceivers, those may very well use a few watts waiting for Wake on Lan packets. Certain SCSI controllers will have their own Out of Band management chips that use a few watts. Then you have a fan spinning slowly to keep the power supply cool for handling all those parts at idle. Servers tend to have lots of bits and pieces that like being on all the time, so even when shut down, the motherboard still tends to be a hive of activity.
  - timthorn 12y ago
    Bear in mind that the Moonshot chassis also contains one or two, potentially 10GbE, switches.
    - lvalsan 12y ago
      The tested Intel Xeon E3-1285L v3 (Haswell) and the IBM Power 8 systems are single mainboard systems. The Intel C2750 (Avoton) and the ARM 64-bit Applied Micro X-Gene 1 are cartridges inside an HP Moonshot chassis. All tested systems are fitted with a BMC. In addition the HP Moonshot chassis also have an internal network switch, uplink module, internal network fabric, chassis fans, chassis manager module, etc. The Intel Avoton chassis is having a 1 GbE internal network fabric and switch with a 6x SFP+ 10 GbE uplink module (one port used) while the ARM 64-bit X-Gene 1 chassis is having a 10 GbE internal network fabric and switch with a 4x QSFP+ uplink module (one port used). The purpose of the off power measurements is to see how much power the chassis infrastructure is drawing. The power consumption of the Intel Xeon E3-1285L v3 (Haswell) chassis with the system off is very low, below the threshold of the Racktivity smart metered PDU used to perform the power measurements. The PDU reports 0, but the real power consumption is in the order of a few Watts. The tested Power 8 processor is inside a Tyan reference system GN70-BP010. Being a reference system, not all components and firmwares have been fully optimised. In the mean time Tyan has launched the TN71-BP012 platform which is not a reference system and should be much more optimised and ready for production use. I would be curious to see what are the improvements, but I don't have any at hand for now.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

ksec 12y ago

I think Power 8 and the ARM are still on older Gen node. Xeon is on 22nm, with the latest Xeon on 14nm Broadwell. So Intel wins on Fabs Tech. And this will not change for another 5 years.

exDM69 12y ago
Semiconductor fabs competing with Intel are a bit behind but that's not the issue here, they were using a 40nm ARM chip but there are 28nm and 20nm fabs available.
lvalsan 12y ago
The Intel chips (Xeon E3-1285L v3 - Haswell and Atom C2750 - Avoton) are both built on 22 nm. The Power 8 processor is using the same process size as the Intel parts, 22 nm. The ARM 64-bit Applied Micro X-Gene 1 SoC tested is on 40 nm. X-Gene 2 is on 28 nm and X-Gene 3 will be build using a 16 nm process. X-Gene 2 is apparently sampling now but we didn't get access to it yet, nor have we seen any publicly available platform using it. Once we'll get access (which should happen soon) to Xeon-D (Broadwell-DE) using a 14 nm process size, the results will be added to the repository at http://lvalsan.web.cern.ch/lvalsan/processor_benchmarking/ http://lvalsan.web.cern.ch/lvalsan/processor_benchmarking/

exDM69 12y ago

Yes, I was disappointed too but... The AArch64 chip used was a 40nm chip. The Intel chips it was up against are 20nm (or as low as 14nm). This has enormous power implications, and given that they're pretty close in power consumption with a huge difference in the fab process, Aarch64 is a strong contender as an architecture.