Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 Haswell Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 Haswell Performance

The new Phoronix.com web server is speeding along this weekend after its deployment. Here's a look in the performance difference...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xeon-E5-2620-SNB-HSW-Linux

[chrisb]

Interesting to compare the 24 core dual E5-2620 v3 against previous 8 core 5960x benchmarks - looks like the 5960x wins in everything except OpenSSL. In John the Ripper and C-Ray performance is more than double. It doesn't seem quite right given that these are highly parallelisable tasks that should be able to take full advantage of 24 cores.

[CrystalGamma]

Yeah, I also expected more of a speedup given the stats ...
But maybe the CPU benchmarks are just too small to benefit much from things like the massively increased RAM size.

[SyXbiT]

Any reason you didn't switch to CentOS 7.1 ?

[Michael]

Any reason you didn't switch to CentOS 7.1 ?

HiVelocity didn't offer an option for having this particular server configuration available in an install for CentOS 7.

[chuckula]

Interesting to compare the 24 core dual E5-2620 v3 against previous 8 core 5960x benchmarks - looks like the 5960x wins in everything except OpenSSL. In John the Ripper and C-Ray performance is more than double. It doesn't seem quite right given that these are highly parallelisable tasks that should be able to take full advantage of 24 cores.

It's not 24 cores. The E5-2620V3 has 6 cores + hyperthreading for 12 "threads", or 12 cores / 24 threads in a dual-socket configuration. The 5960X has 8 cores/16 threads and a higher clockspeed. Obviously in workloads that use less than 8 threads the 5960X is going to have the lead and it might maintain a lead in the 8 - 16 thread range depending upon how well hyperthreading works and how much overhead there is in dealing with 2 physical CPUs in the workload.

[mczak]

It's not 24 cores. The E5-2620V3 has 6 cores + hyperthreading for 12 "threads", or 12 cores / 24 threads in a dual-socket configuration. The 5960X has 8 cores/16 threads and a higher clockspeed. Obviously in workloads that use less than 8 threads the 5960X is going to have the lead and it might maintain a lead in the 8 - 16 thread range depending upon how well hyperthreading works and how much overhead there is in dealing with 2 physical CPUs in the workload.

It is quite notable that as far as Haswell Xeons go the E5-2620v3 is a very cheap option - in fact two of them are still cheaper than a single 5960X...
For a dual socket solution, this seems somewhat odd, as you could easily get a single 12-core Haswell Xeon (with the same performance). Two sockets gives you potentially more max memory but the used board has just 4 slots per socket anyway hence zero advantage there. I guess this was done purely for cost reasons, since that single 12-core Haswell Xeon (with similar clocks and not quite twice the TDP, it should be somewhat more power efficient) would cost twice as much as those 2 low-end 6-core Xeons, though presumably the motherboard could be a bit cheaper.
The memory configuration is also somewhat non-ideal, since these cpus have quad-channel memory interfaces, and here one cpu gets 4 dimms and the other just 2. Should not be an issue though tests have shown the low-end Haswell Xeons (these using the LCC die, that is up to 8 cores) do not actually really benefit from more memory bandwidth, though the asymmetric memory configuration still looks a bit odd.

[torsionbar28]

Any reason you didn't switch to CentOS 7.1 ?

The better question is, any reason you're using CentOS rather than RHEL? RHEL licenses aren't that much, especially the self-support ones. Don't get me wrong, CentOS is great for test environments and home hobbyist use. But for a major Linux media company like Phoronix to use it in production instead of paying the few bucks for RHEL sends the wrong message I think. The whole "support the community that supports you" thing.

PS. Please don't take this the wrong way, it's meant as constructive feedback not a jab against Phoronix.