A Look At The Xeon Gold 6138 + Tyan GT24E-B7106 1U Linux Server Performance

For some initial reference values of the Tyan GT24E-B7106 with the dual Xeon Gold CPUs, their performance were compared to some of the other (single socket) CPUs commonly tested at Phoronix both of the Core and Xeon families. For reference are these numbers compared to a Core i7 6800K, Core i9 7900X, Xeon E3-1245 v5, Xeon E3-1280 v5, and Xeon E5-2687W v3. Unfortunately we don't get often seeded with Xeon CPUs and thus the initial comparison is quite small. But AMD should be sending out EPYC samples soon and I very much look forward to comparing these Xeon Gold processors to EPYC.

These initial tests were all done with Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution while running the Linux 4.12 kernel and using the GCC 7.2 compiler and EXT4 file-system. A variety of server-oriented workloads were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite from NPB, OpenSSL, GCC / Linux kernel compilation, and other parallel workloads.

Additionally, some other tests for publishing today are showing how the Tyan GT24E-B7106 compares to an older Sun Fire X4170 with dual Xeon E5540 based on the Nehalem architecture. It's an older dual-socket server, but when spending thousands of dollars per server, not everyone is in a rush to upgrade. The Xeon E5540 were great for their time with four cores, eight threads, 2.53GHz base frequency, 2.80GHz turbo frequency, and 8MB cache while each package has an 80 Watt TDP.

This comparison is also interesting as via the WattsUp Pro power meter interfacing with the Phoronix Test Suite is also a look at the AC system power consumption and performance-per-Watt metrics between these dual Intel 1U servers. The 1U server tests were carried out using Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS as Clear Linux wasn't able to run on the Sun Fire system due to the system lacking UEFI support. Each system was tested freshly "out of the box" on this current Ubuntu Linux Long Term Support release.