Intel's Xeon E5-2600 V2: 12-core Ivy Bridge EP for Servers

Other Improvements

One of the improvements that caught our attention was the "Fast Access of FS & GS base registers". We were under the impression that segment registers were not used in a modern OS with 64-bit flat addressing (with the exception of the Binary Translation VMM of VMware), but the promise of "Critical optimization for large thread-count server workloads" in Intel's Xeon E5-2600 V2 presentation seems to indicate otherwise.

Indeed no modern operating system uses the segment registers, but FS and GS registers are an exception. The GS register (for 64-bit; FS for 32-bit x86) points to the Thread Local Storage descriptor block. That thread block stores unique information for each thread and is accessed quite a bit when many threads are running concurrently.

That sounds great, but unfortunately operating system support is not sufficient to benefit from this. An older Intel presentation states that this feature is implement by adding "Four new instructions for ring-3 access of FS & GS base registers". The GCC compiler 4.7 (and later) has a flag called "-fsgsbase" to recompile your source code to make use of this. So although Ivy Bridge could make user thread switching a lot faster, it will take a while before commercial code actually implements this.

Other ISA optimizations (Float16 to and from SP conversion) will be useful for some image/video processing applications, but we cannot imagine that many server applications will benefit from this. HPC/render farms on the other hand may find this useful.

The Uncore

The uncore part has some modest improvements too. The snoop directory has now three states (Exclusive, Modified, Shared) instead of two and it improves server performance in 2-socket configurations as well. In Sandy Bridge the snoop directoy was disabled in 2-socket configurations as it hampered performance (which is also a best practice on the Opterons).

Also, the snoop broadcoasting got a lot more "opportunistic". If lots of traffic is going on, broadcasts are avoided; if very little is going on, it "snoops away". If it is likely that the snoop directory will not have the entry, the snoop is issued prior to directory feedback. "Opportunistic" snooping makes sure that snooping traffic is reduced and as a result the multi-core performance scales better. Which is quite important when your are dealing with up to 24 physical cores in a system.

Wrapping up, maximum PCI Express bandwidth when performing two thirds reads and one third writes has been further improved from 80GB/s (using quad-channel 1600 MT/s DDR3) to 90GB/s. T here are now two memory controllers instead of one to reduce latency. Bandwidth is also improved thanks to the support for DDR3- 1866. Lastly, the half width QPI mode is disabled in turbo mode, as it is very likely that there is a lot of traffic between the interconnects between the sockets. Turbo mode is after all triggered by heavy CPU activity.