Hands On With The Tyan Thunder GT24EB7106; Building The Kernel In Under 30 Seconds

The Tyan Thunder CX GT24EB7106 paired with Intel's new Xeon Scalable processors can offer pretty thunderous performance. This server has just arrived at Phoronix for testing and so far is certainly showing off its potential when loading it with dual 20c/40t CPUs (80 threads combined) and 96GB of DDR4-2666 memory.

Just as a teaser ahead of our full Tyan Thunder CX GT24EB7106 review in the weeks ahead alongside many other interesting Linux performance benchmark articles from the Xeon Scalable platform, this is a mighty powerful 1U server.

This particular model for review has four 2.5/3.5-inch hot-swap bays while Tyan also offers models with NVMe options as well as many as 12 hot-swap bays depending upon your needs. There are redundant 650W PSUs and the board can handle up to two 165 Watt Xeon Scalable CPUs.

This testing is being done with two Intel Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs. The Xeon Gold 6138 are twenty-core processors plus Hyper Threading to yield 40 threads per package. These CPUs have a modest 2.0GHz base frequency but can turbo to 3.7GHz. There is a 27.5MB L3 cache for each CPU and a 125 Watt TDP. These Xeon Scalable CPUs do support AVX-512 too and native DDR4-2666 support with support for six memory channels. They are powerful, but retail for about $2600 USD per CPU.

On the memory side I am testing with 12 x Crucial DDR4-2666 ECC RDIMMs. The storage side will be swapped out a few times but at the moment is a Samsung 850 PRO SSD as the boot drive as well as a Seagate 2TB HDD and two Toshiba SSDs... I do have some interesting storage benchmark articles coming up with this system such as some Bcache server tests (hence why an HDD was still being used) and other new Linux RAID tests, so stay tuned for a variety of interesting tests there.

As a teaser to the performance in its stock configuration with a fresh load of Clear Linux and not using ccache or any other tuning at this stage and building from disk...

I will have many interesting benchmarks already planned, but if you have any other test requests for what you'd like to see from this Tyan Thunder CX server with Xeon Scalable, share your feedback in the forums. More details on the server via Tyan.com. This should also make for a fun comparison to EPYC, but still waiting on AMD to send over those samples they mentioned last week.