Quad Core Intel Xeon 53xx Clovertown

Analysis

When it comes to power consumption numbers, we could only compare the quad core Xeon with the dual core one. Our Opteron platform was too different to make such comparisons meaningful. In Specjbb2005, the Clovertown machine consumed about 20 to 40 Watt more, which is about 8 to 15 percent. If you want to compare the Xeon with the Opteron platform, check out Jason and Ross' testing here.

Let us summarize what we have learned so far. Thanks to the very competitive price, the new quad core Xeon is in many applications a winner when it comes to price/performance: a dual socket server is a lot cheaper than a quad socket model and a 2.33GHz quad core Xeon costs the same as a dual core Xeon 5160. Despite the very aggressive price setting and the excellent per socket performance, the newest Xeon is not unbeatable, a result of mediocre scaling.

To put everything in perspective, you can never give enough benchmarking numbers. Let us see what Intel's own benchmarking tells us. First Intel shows off some benchmarks which really demonstrate fantastic scaling moving from one core to eight.


Eight benchmarks which scale excellent makes for a very nice chart, but in reality we are only looking at three different benchmarks. Blast, Linpack and matrix multiplies can all be categorized as matrix multiply benchmarks. Scholes and Sungard ACR use different algorithms, but both are products of Sungard and both are used in the financial world. They have a high value to financial analysts who use these tools, and complete our analysis. We found that per socket, the quad core Xeon offers about twice the performance of the dual Opteron per socket, and about 10% per core (Octal core 2.33GHz Xeon versus 2.4GHz octal Opteron). So yes, there are applications out there where a "Clovertown" Xeon is a huge step forward. The question is how common are these situations? Intel seems to have anticipated this question and the performance group of Portland presented a very interesting slide.


Notice that Intel uses a 120W TDP 2.66GHz quad core Xeon and not the 2.33GHz we tested. Considering that everybody - including Intel - agrees that we should go for maximum performance/watt, we would chose the 2.33GHz instead, as it has the same TDP as the Xeon 5160 3GHz which is used as baseline. This means that we have to subtract about 13% of the performance figures if we want to keep the TDP the same, and in that case some of the "compelling gains" are no longer really tangible. So we can conclude that CRM, Financial analysis, ERP and Java applications are the best applications for our Clovertown Xeon. For rendering, transaction processing, and especially structural simulation (LS Dyna) and flow modeling (fluent) the picture is a lot less clear.