Xeon W
Xeon scalable
You know
They're both called Xeon
But these things are really different
One of them is basically a Core i9 with ECC memory support
And the other one is a server CPU that I fangirl all over
Because I love super high-end expensive tech toys
Now, in the past
You needed multiple CPU's
in one multi socketed motherboard in order to handle intensive multi-threaded workloads
But, is that still the case today?
Do you still need 2 of these, given that a single Xeon Platinum 8180
is 28 cores and 56 threads on a single chip.
I don't know
What is the purpose today of
A dual socket machine like this one and how much have single high core count CPUs?
Eroded the market that they used to enjoy
Let's find out. Shall we?
Alright there's a lot more room down here and we are gonna need it
for this honking, not to mention heavy test bench.
On this test bench, You will find the Asus C621E Sage
This is a dual socket motherboard, rocking 2 LGA 3647
sockets for Intel's Xeon scalable lineup of CPU's
And setups like this have actually been around as far back as the 486 in 1989
With the resulting second-hand hardware giving enthusiasts the ability to get multiple physical cores
in their homes over the years with the peak being somewhere in the mid 2000s or so
But, that was then and this is now
Now you can get multiple processing cores in a single chip
To see how far things have come what we're gonna do is pit this machine against the fastest
Single CPU that we've tested to date
We're gonna try to keep the number of variables to a minimum in order to gauge the impact
That these extra CPU cores will have on our setup
Though it should be noted that there aren't many options when it comes to aftermarket LGA 3647 coolers
because most of the folks selling these kinds of systems would figure out their own solution
So that means that our dual socket workstation will run a little bit toasty
But we didn't observe any thermal throttling so it shouldn't affect our performance
Let's start off then with good old-fashioned
Cinebench
I mean, we've seen this run before but it's always fun to see it finish that quickly
So, in a surprise to no one the dual socket machine is faster
but considering it's 56 processing cores
not all of our workloads scale in the way that we might expect
7-zip for example, shows a smaller than expected gain over our Core i9 Extreme Edition
Y-Cruncher even finds itself losing ground
Asus real bench demonstrates this
though with that said the encoding benchmark eats out a lead over our Core i9 7980XE
and then Blender, well here we actually get a victory for our dual CPU system again
Showing this platform's potential for expanding render farms
but
What is really going on here
Well, something you guys have to realize is
that there is more to a dual socket configuration than just more cores
Do you remember when AMD managed a three percent improvement in
IPC with 2nd Gen Ryzen just by improving cache latency?
So on this motherboard, we've got two separate CPU's with two separate sets of cache and memory
See, these 6 banks go to this one and these 6 banks are wired into this one
and that means a lot of latency for compute tasks that require the same data sets
This latency is a necessary evil in the design of multiprocessor systems
because of the need for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) for short
That allows these two processors to efficiently share resources or as efficiently as they can
So the short version of this is that it works by transparently allocating devices and memory to each CPU
which means they can more easily avoid interrupting each other while accessing those resources
This in turn reduces the amount of waiting around that they have to do for those resources to become available
So, that's what we're seeing during our testing like in Y-Cruncher for example...
Where both CPU's are working on the same data, but...
*babbling*
What if we could use different data sets
Then we should be able to find this kind of setups true calling
and how better to do that
Than to effectively turn this system into two independent computing machines using virtualization
So let's fire up unRAID, which uses Red Hat KVM as a hypervisor to see what kind of results we get
splitting these resources into multiple independent machines
Immediately, we see worse results from our VM's than our original 56 Core testing
But, look closely[er] at how much lower it is
It's not a whole lot
In every test, it's basically the same story here and we are still
Wwwaay out ahead of the Core i9 Extreme Edition, particularly when it comes to Blender
Now if we consider the fact that we are getting simultaneous work done
That gives us a good look at what an optimized workload might look like I mean or heck
Virtualization itself is a legitimate task to, I mean this thing
Could be so many gamers in one PC ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
but I digress I mean nobody is gonna buy something like this for their personal rig anytime soon given the
$10,000 per CPU price tag which puts it squarely in the territory of
"big the size of the check doesn't matter" business
What they care about is density
The more processing power, a single computer can manage, the more processing power that can be
physically fit into a building and this is perhaps most important for data centers and render farms in particular
The less those guys have to spend on setting up the electricity and cooling management for a data center
Versus the amount of performance they can get the better
soooooo
Will multiple sockets make a comeback in the prosumer space?
Outside of you know oil and gas exploration where
there are still workloads that can benefit from this kind of thing
the chances look pretty slim if you ask me
But I don't necessarily think that it's Intel's intent to sell these chips in the prosumer space and for that matter
Even in the enterprise space. I don't think they knew a ton of them
For me, I look at a product like this as more of like a future crafting exercise where it is available today, but
it's more of a representation of what actually might be attainable a generation or two from now
Just like the 22 core processors that we were playing around with a couple of years ago
Nowadays, those are much more affordable and businesses are using them to power your cloud computing services
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now I'm off to
Finally put this to use for the reason that I obtained it
Many video editors, one CPU