Intel's Xeon E5-2600 V2: 12-core Ivy Bridge EP for Servers
by Johan De Gelas on September 17, 2013 12:00 AM ESTSKUs and Pricing
Before we start with the benchmarks, we first want to see what you get for your money. Let's compare the AMD chips with Intel's offerings. To reduce the clutter, we did not list all of the SKUs but have tried to include useful points of comparison.
| AMD vs. Intel 2-socket SKU Comparison | |||||||||
|
Xeon E5 |
Cores/ Threads |
TDP |
Clock Speed (GHz) |
Price | Opteron |
Modules/ Integer cores |
TDP |
Clock Speed (GHz) |
Price |
| High Performance | High Performance | ||||||||
| 2697v2 | 12/24 | 130W | 2.7-3.5 | $2614 | |||||
| 2695v2 | 12/24 | 115W | 2.4-3.2 | $2336 | |||||
| 2687Wv2 | 8/16 | 150W | 3.4-4.0 | $2108 | |||||
| 2680v2 | 10/20 | 115W | 2.8-3.6 | $1723 | |||||
| 2680(*) | 8/16 | 130W | 2.7-3.5 | $1723 | |||||
| 2660v2 | 10/20 | 115W | 2.2-3.0 | $1389 | 6386SE | 8/16 | 140W | 2.8-3.5 | $1392 |
| Midrange | Midrange | ||||||||
| 2650v2 | 8/16 | 95W | 2.6-3.4 | $1166 | 6380 | 8/16 | 115W | 2.5-3.4 | $1088 |
| 2640v2 | 8/16 | 95W | 2.0-2.5 | $885 | |||||
| 6376 | 8/16 | 115W | 2.3-3.2 | $703 | |||||
| Budget | Budget | ||||||||
| 2630v2 | 6/12 | 80W | 2.6-3.1 | $612 | 6348 | 6/12 | 115W | 2.8-3.4 | $575 |
| 2620v2 | 6/12 | 80W | 2.1-2.6 | $406 | 6234 | 6/12 | 115W | 2.4-3.0 | $415 |
| Power Optimized | Power Optimized | ||||||||
| 2650Lv2 | 10/20 | 70W | 1.7-2.1 | $1219 | |||||
| 2630Lv2 | 6/12 | 70W | 2.4-2.8 | $612 | 6366HE | 8/16 | 85W | 1.8-3.1 | $575 |
(*) Sandy Bridge based Xeon, for reference purposes
The lack of competition at the high-end cannot be more obvious. AMD simply does not have anything competitive at the moment in that part of the market. However, Intel and the OEMs still have to convince the data center people to keep the upgrade cycles relatively short. If you look at the the E5 2680 v2, you get two extra cores, a 100MHz clock speed bump and a lower TDP compared to the predecessor E5 2680. Intel charges more for the best Xeons, but you do get more for your money.
The most expensive Xeon (at 130W TDP) is a lot more expensive, but that is no surprise given the fact that it it is an expensive chip to make with such a massive die (12 cores, 30MB L3, two separate memory controllers).
Every Opteron has been relegated to the lower-end and midrange segments, and it is not looking good. We know that the AMD Opteron needs more threads or clock speed to keep up with the previous Xeon E5 performance wise. The midrange and budget AMD Opterons no longer have that advantage, and they need more power too. A price cut looks to be necessary, although an Opteron server is typically less expensive than a similar Xeon system.
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mczak - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Yes that's surprising indeed. I wonder how large the difference in die size is (though the reason for two dies might have more to do with power draw).zepi - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
How about adding turbo frequencies to sku-comparison tables? That'd make comparison of the sku's a bit easier as that is sometimes more repsentative figure depending on the load that these babies are run.JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
I added Turbo speeds to all SKUs as well as linking the product names to the various detail pages at AMD/Intel. Hope that helps! (And there were a few clock speed errors before that are now corrected.)zepi - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Appreciated!zepi - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
For most server buyers things are not this simple, but for armchair sysadmins this might do:http://cornflake.softcon.fi/export/ivyexeon.png
ShieTar - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
"Once we run up to 48 threads, the new Xeon can outperform its predecessor by a wide margin of ~35%. It is interesting to compare this with the Core i7-4960x results , which is the same die as the "budget" Xeon E5s (15MB L3 cache dies). The six-core chip at 3.6GHz scores 12.08."What I find most interesting here is that the Xeon manages to show a factor 23 between multi-threaded and single-threaded performance, a very good scaling for a 24-thread CPU. The 4960X only manages a factor of 7 with its 12 threads. So it is not merely a question of "cores over clock speed", but rather hyperthreading seems to not work very well on the consumer CPUs in the case of Cinebench. The same seems to be true for the Sandy Bridge and Haswell models as well.
Do you know why this is? Is hyperthreading implemented differently for the Xeons? Or is it caused by the different OS used (Windows 2008 vs Windows 7/8)?
JlHADJOE - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
^ That's very interesting. Made me look over the Xeon results and yes, they do appear to be getting close to a 100% increase in performance for each thread added.psyq321 - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Hyperthreading is the same.However, HCC version of IvyTown has two separate memory controllers, more features enabled (direct cache access, different prefetchers etc.). So it might scale better.
I am achieving 1.41x speed-up with dual Xeon 2697 v2 setup, compared to my old dual Xeon 2687W setup. This is so close to the "ideal" 1.5x scaling that it is pretty amazing. And, 2687w was running on a slightly higher clock in all-core turbo.
So, I must say I am very happy with the IvyTown upgrade.
garadante - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
It's not 24 threads, it's 48 threads for that scaling. 2x physical CPUs with 12 cores each, for 24 physical cores and a total of 48 logical cores.Kevin G - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Actually if you run the numbers, the scaling factor from 1 to 48 threads is actually 21.9. I'm curious what the result would have been with Hyperthreading disabled as that can actually decrease performance in some instances.