Intel Xeon E5-2600: Doing Damage With Two Eight-Core CPUs

[cangelini]

Intel's vaunted Sandy Bridge architecture has finally made its way to the company's dual- and quad-socket-capable Xeon processors. We got our hands on a pair of eight-core Xeon E5-2687W CPUs to compare against the older Xeon 5600- and 5500-series chips.

Intel Xeon E5-2600: Doing Damage With Two Eight-Core CPUs : Read more

 

[CaedenV]

My brain cannot comprehend what CS5 would look like with this combined with a 1TB R4 drive, and the GTX680 version of the Quatro would look like... and I am sure my wallet cannot!

Great article! I was not expecting my mind to be blown away today, and it was

 

[dalethepcman]

No gaming benchmarks? I know this is a high workstation / mid server build, but you know some of the boutiques will make a gaming rig out of any platform. Just out of curiosity, I would have liked to see 2x7970 or 2x580 and a few gaming benchmarks thrown in.

 

[willard]

[citation][nom]dalethepcman[/nom]No gaming benchmarks? I know this is a high workstation / mid server build, but you know some of the boutiques will make a gaming rig out of any platform. Just out of curiosity, I would have liked to see 2x7970 or 2x580 and a few gaming benchmarks thrown in.[/citation]
I'd be really surprised to see these in gaming machines, even in the high end boutiques. That's a $2k processor they reviewed, and basically all it offers over the $1k SB-E chip (for gamers) is an extra pair of cores, which games can't make use of.

 

[nforce4max]

I must say DROOL :O

 

[esrever]

why aren't AMD cpus tested too? I wouldn't mind seeing how 2x interlagos stacks up.

 

[reclusiveorc]

I wonder how fast TempEncode would chew thru transcoding avi/wmv files to mp3/mp4

 

[willard]

[citation][nom]esrever[/nom]why aren't AMD cpus tested too? I wouldn't mind seeing how 2x interlagos stacks up.[/citation]
Anandtech benched those next to the new Xeons. Went about as well as Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/6

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]esrever[/nom]why aren't AMD cpus tested too? I wouldn't mind seeing how 2x interlagos stacks up.[/citation]
Mentioned on the test page--I've invited them to send hardware and they haven't moved on it yet.

 

[willard]

[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Mentioned on the test page--I've invited them to send hardware and they haven't moved on it yet.[/citation]
I would guess that's because Interlagos is garbage compared to the new Xeons and they know it. I don't think they're terribly eager for the front page of Tom's Hardware to show the low end Xeon's beating the best Interlagos has to offer.

 

[Onus]

What, or who, was the target? Are there military applications for this weapon?

Sorry, vote me down all you like, but the title was just silly.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]willard[/nom]I would guess that's because Interlagos is garbage compared to the new Xeons and they know it. I don't think they're terribly eager for the front page of Tom's Hardware to show the low end Xeon's beating the best Interlagos has to offer.[/citation]
Not really my place to speculate--only to point out that I similarly wanted to see AMD hardware included and explain why it isn't there

 

[willard]

[citation][nom]jtt283[/nom]What, or who, was the target? Are there military applications for this weapon?Sorry, vote me down all you like, but the title was just silly.[/citation]
No, the title is a fairly common phrase in American English.

"Now that I've got X, I can really do some damage" would probably be the way I hear it used most often.

 

[willard]

[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Not really my place to speculate--only to point out that I similarly wanted to see AMD hardware included and explain why it isn't there[/citation]
Yeah, I understand that you're in a sensitive position. But being a lowly commenter, I'm free to speculate all I want!

Muahahahaha!

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]willard[/nom]Yeah, I understand that you're in a sensitive position. But being a lowly commenter, I'm free to speculate all I want!Muahahahaha![/citation]
Precisely ;-)

 

[wiyosaya]

Interesting results.

In my opinion, the SolidWorks test is also one of those not representative of typical SolidWorks tasks. PhotoView only renders realistic images of a SolidWorks model. Personally, I think the Specviewperf SolidWorks test would be significantly more representative of average SolidWorks use.

Although I really hate to draw this comparison, PhotoView is more like using Power Point to organize a display of images created in Photoshop. In this comparison, most of the grunt work is done by Photoshop rather than Power Point, as is most of the grunt work done in SolidWorks then rendered in PhotoView. Performance differences revealed by the Specviewperf test are more informative, IMHO. See these.

 

[juan83]

great review.. i wonder myself how long we 'll have to wait to see 8 cores and 16 threads on desktop segment as a default pc.. (or less than 400 dolars)

we have to wait to long for that..

 

[Guest]

I would love one of those with a pair of FireGL cards and a mix of SCSI and SSD drives. I'm sure a dual core version of all of that will run me close to $8K though. Consider though how much Sun SPARC stations and SGI Workstations costed a decade or so ago? Workstations that were not nearly as capable went 20-25k. A dual core E5-2687 with FireGL cards and SSD drives is the fastest workstation you could put together on any platform and you can do it for far less than the 25k from years ago. Absolutely crazy to think about it in those terms.

 

[EXT64]

I think you need to run some folding at home on that. I can't imagine what it would get in PPD, considering how well the old Intel 6 cores (Gulftown) do.

 

[jaquith]

Great article and thanks! 16-cores/32-threads is nice!

Reading this however, all I can do is think how PO'ed I am at Intel not enabling the 7th & 8th cores on the SB-E i7-3960X and i7-3930K.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]jaquith[/nom]Great article and thanks! 16-cores/32-threads is nice! Reading this however, all I can do is think how PO'ed I am at Intel not enabling the 7th & 8th cores on the SB-E i7-3960X and i7-3930K.[/citation]
I'm going to drop these into X79 and compare the numbers to see how power is affected. Maybe get a little overclocking out of them, just to check ;-)

 

[dimar]

no x264 benchmarks? :-(
x264 keeps my Core i7-3930K 100% loaded on all 12 logical cores, when converting uncompressed AVI to blu-ray compliant files.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]dimar[/nom]no x264 benchmarks? :-(x264 keeps my Core i7-3930K 100% loaded on all 12 logical cores, when converting uncompressed AVI to blu-ray compliant files.[/citation]
Have run them before, but didn't here. I'll talk to our team about automating a good test for this.

 

[dragonsqrrl]

[citation][nom]esrever[/nom]why aren't AMD cpus tested too? I wouldn't mind seeing how 2x interlagos stacks up.[/citation]
[citation][nom]willard[/nom]Anandtech benched those next to the new Xeons. Went about as well as Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge.http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553 [...] -servers/6[/citation]
Anandtech did a review of the Xeon E5. They had a 2x Opteron 6276 config for comparison, and well... I have to agree with willard's assessment. Interlagos seems to have trouble competing against the the Xeon X5600 series. It simply isn't a competition for the E5 2600's with their lower power consumption and significantly higher performance.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/1

 

[mickey21]

[citation][nom]willard[/nom]I'd be really surprised to see these in gaming machines, even in the high end boutiques. That's a $2k processor they reviewed, and basically all it offers over the $1k SB-E chip (for gamers) is an extra pair of cores, which games can't make use of.[/citation]
I hear what you are saying, but that doesnt mean there arent people out there that dont want one unit to do both. Personally I am same way so I can understand that someone be curious about it. Not like it would be hard to. Some people like myself work with huge amounts of data AND like to play games at home. I find myself having both hobbies of video/graphical manipulation AND gaming. I also find at times I have some money to burn, what is the problem with that?