4 ms·

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

by roel_v 12y ago

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?

berkut 12y ago
Over standard similar arch i7s you mean? They support ECC ram, which is pretty important for some people. I believe the pre-fetchers are more aggressive on the Xeons as well, to make more use of the available memory bandwidth available with multiple QPI connections.
tambourine_man 12y ago
ecc memory for one, even if it's just as a psychological reassurance in my use case.
- TheCondor 12y ago
  My last home server was a core i7 with 16gb of non-ecc. I noticed some PostgreSQL corruption, which was odd to me. Then I noticed the most of my compressed backups failed to decompress all the way, due to some corruption. It'd make a backup just fine but they couldn't verify. It had been going on silently for weeks or maybe months before I noticed. Turned out to be a bad memory chip. I have a Xeon with ecc now.
danieldk 12y ago
I have a Xeon-based workstation at home, to compensate my relatively weak Mac Mini, mostly for machine learning. I'd say that normally, you probably don't need it, unless you want ECC memory, large cache sizes, large amounts of memory, etc. (compared to Core i7) However, they can be very price-effective. Many companies buy workstations for e.g. CAD and replace their machines every 2 or 3 years. Since they are then sold en masse on eBay, you basically get a machine that is still high-end for a bargain price. E.g., my Xeon workstation was ~400 Euro, has a Xeon E3-1270 that is ~4 times more powerful than my relatively new Mac Mini, comes with an acceptable CUDA-capable GPU, and 12GB memory.
CHY872 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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).
michael_h 12y ago
It depends on what you're doing and which Xeon you get. If you're doing number crunching, then it will definitely be worth it. I have some Xeon's with 20MB cache that cut my processing time by ~40%, so they paid for themselves the first time I ran something on them.
- danieldk 12y ago
  If you're doing number crunching, then it will definitely be worth it. Depends on the kind of number crunching. If you are doing expensive matrix computations, a high-end GTX CPU or a Tesla stream processor may buy you much more for the same price. Also, if the choice is between cache size and architecture, a new architecture may bring more. E.g. my Core i7 MacBook royally beats some of our Xeon machines with 25MB cache, by virtue of having AVX with 256 bit wide registers for SIMD. Of course, if you can have it all, take it all :).
bhouston 12y ago
I have an Intel Core i7 4930K with simple auto-overclocking, its pretty sweet. I would suggest for software development, you can stick with the high end Core i7s that are usually priced around $500 - $800 per CPU. If I was to buy a new CPU today, I'd buy this one: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5930K+%40+3.50GHz&id=2336 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5930K... I also have quad channel OC memory on my motherboard, the quad channel part is actually significant in terms of compile speed (and the OC part isn't I found out.)
- kromlic 12y ago
  Just installed that CPU into my work computer a couple months ago, and it's indeed quite a fantastic deal overall. It's really easy to see the benefit from having a fast workstation, even if you're not developing extremely resource-intensive applications.

by roel_v 12y ago

berkut 12y ago

Over standard similar arch i7s you mean? They support ECC ram, which is pretty important for some people. I believe the pre-fetchers are more aggressive on the Xeons as well, to make more use of the available memory bandwidth available with multiple QPI connections.

tambourine_man 12y ago

ecc memory for one, even if it's just as a psychological reassurance in my use case.

TheCondor 12y ago
My last home server was a core i7 with 16gb of non-ecc. I noticed some PostgreSQL corruption, which was odd to me. Then I noticed the most of my compressed backups failed to decompress all the way, due to some corruption. It'd make a backup just fine but they couldn't verify. It had been going on silently for weeks or maybe months before I noticed. Turned out to be a bad memory chip. I have a Xeon with ecc now.

danieldk 12y ago

I have a Xeon-based workstation at home, to compensate my relatively weak Mac Mini, mostly for machine learning. I'd say that normally, you probably don't need it, unless you want ECC memory, large cache sizes, large amounts of memory, etc. (compared to Core i7) However, they can be very price-effective. Many companies buy workstations for e.g. CAD and replace their machines every 2 or 3 years. Since they are then sold en masse on eBay, you basically get a machine that is still high-end for a bargain price. E.g., my Xeon workstation was ~400 Euro, has a Xeon E3-1270 that is ~4 times more powerful than my relatively new Mac Mini, comes with an acceptable CUDA-capable GPU, and 12GB memory.

CHY872 12y ago

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 12y ago
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).

michael_h 12y ago

It depends on what you're doing and which Xeon you get. If you're doing number crunching, then it will definitely be worth it. I have some Xeon's with 20MB cache that cut my processing time by ~40%, so they paid for themselves the first time I ran something on them.

danieldk 12y ago
If you're doing number crunching, then it will definitely be worth it. Depends on the kind of number crunching. If you are doing expensive matrix computations, a high-end GTX CPU or a Tesla stream processor may buy you much more for the same price. Also, if the choice is between cache size and architecture, a new architecture may bring more. E.g. my Core i7 MacBook royally beats some of our Xeon machines with 25MB cache, by virtue of having AVX with 256 bit wide registers for SIMD. Of course, if you can have it all, take it all :).

bhouston 12y ago

I have an Intel Core i7 4930K with simple auto-overclocking, its pretty sweet. I would suggest for software development, you can stick with the high end Core i7s that are usually priced around $500 - $800 per CPU. If I was to buy a new CPU today, I'd buy this one: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5930K+%40+3.50GHz&id=2336 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-5930K... I also have quad channel OC memory on my motherboard, the quad channel part is actually significant in terms of compile speed (and the OC part isn't I found out.)

kromlic 12y ago
Just installed that CPU into my work computer a couple months ago, and it's indeed quite a fantastic deal overall. It's really easy to see the benefit from having a fast workstation, even if you're not developing extremely resource-intensive applications.