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

Now onwards to the Sun Fire X4170 to Tyan S7106 comparison showing how Intel dual-socket Xeon performance has evolved since Nehalem EP to Xeon Scalable Gold based on the Skylake microarchitecture.

While the Tyan GT24E-B7106 with dual Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs can build the Linux kernel in 24 seconds (or even around 20 seconds on Clear Linux), the Sun Fire X4170 with Xeon E5540 CPUs took 109 seconds.

The peak power consumption on the Tyan system is greater than the Sun Fire, which isn't much of a surprise considering the E5540 has an 80 Watt TDP per processor while the more powerful Xeon Gold 6138s take in 125 Watts. But it's good to see the minimum/idle power use being much lower with this modern server.

The reported system temperature on the Tyan server started out lower than the dual Nehalem EP box and also cooled down quicker, showing a lower maximum and average temperature, even with having the more power hungry processors.

A look at the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, first with the embarrassingly parallel workload. Going from the 16 threads on the Nehalem EP box to 80 threads with the Skylake Xeon Scalable CPUs yielded an improvement of 4.29x in the EP workload.

In a more realistic workload for these servers is running John The Ripper. Here the newer server pulled out a 7.15x improvement over the older Nehalem EP system.

The system power use was similar between the systems while the Tyan server did peak higher with its higher-TDP processors.

When generating the performance-per-Watt report with John The Ripper, the dual Xeon Gold 6138s yielded a 6.91x improvement in performance-per-Watt over the dual Xeon E5540 system.

With OpenSSL there was a 10.11x increase in raw performance or 10.4x increase in performance-per-Watt.