Xeon E5 - nearly here...
One of the server industry's worst-kept secrets, Intel's much-delayed Xeon E5 processor platform (Romley/Sandy Bridge E), is due to be officially unveiled tomorrow (6 March). Xeon processors are also widely used in workstations, and we recently took the opportunity to test an all-new Xeon E5 workstation ahead of the launch, to see what the new silicon has to offer.
Based on a Supermicro motherboard equipped with a pair of the required Socket 2011 slots, the workstation we tested was the Venom 2000-7T from Boston Limited — a rather anonymous-looking black box also set for release this week.
The model we looked at came with a pair of Xeon E5-2670 processors inside. These are clocked at a relatively slow 2.6GHz, but the faster SKUs come with hefty price tags and the E5-2670 looks set to be a popular choice until prices come down. Moreover, it's not a bad compromise, with eight cores plus HyperThreading, enabling the E5-2670 to deliver 16 virtual processors per socket under Windows while sitting about three-quarters of the way up the tree in terms of price.
Open up the Venom 2000-7T and the processors are unmissable — or rather, it's hard to miss their massive heatsinks, which are equipped with individual fans to keep temperatures on an even keel. There's plenty of room for memory too, with DIMM slots to accommodate up to 512GB; the base configuration (£5,499 ex. VAT) ships with a modest 32GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM.
The all-important video interface is handled by a plug-in Nvidia Quadro 4000 on this workstation. On the storage front there's a 128GB SSD used as a boot disk plus a couple of 1TB SATA drives, configured as a mirrored pair, for data.
A 64-bit install of Windows 7 is also included in the price, and using this we ran CineBench 11.5 — a benchmark based on Maxon's Cinema 4D animation software, as used by the studios and production companies that are potential customers for workstations like the Viper.
The dual-Xeon E5-2670 workstation returned a CineBench 11.5 score of 22.45, putting it on a par with alternatives equipped with processors from the top of the Xeon X5600 family — the family the new E5 chips will replace.
In some ways that's a little disappointing, but faster implementations of the new Xeon would boost performance further. Moreover, compared to, say, a Xeon X5680 you're getting the same performance for less money.
CineBench also returns an OpenGL score. This is mostly determined by the graphics card, the Quadro 4000 returning 58.25fps, which is good. However, if you want to maximise performance you'll need to wait for adapters that can take advantage of the new PCI Express 3.0 technology delivered by the Xeon E5. When that happens, the Supermicro motherboard can take three.
No doubt there will be lot more discussion regarding the performance of the Xeon E5 in the coming days — especially in servers, where it looks set to bolster Intel's position at the top of the processor tree.
Alan Stevens