A View of Our Lab

We installed the the new Intel "Brickland" server in our newest rack...

...and it was placed on top of its predecessor, the "Boxboro" server.

A look at the back: two 1200W PSUs and a dual-10Gb Ethernet interface. PCIe cards must be mounted horizontally via the riser cards.

Like Boxboro, memory is placed on daughter/riser cards with two memory buffers ("Jordan Creek"). Once we remove the memory daughter cards...

...you can finally see the massive heatsinks on top of our Xeon E7-4890 v2 processors.

The SKUs and Prices Our Benchmarks and Configuration
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  • Kevin G - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link

    And a quick addition:

    There will indeed be a quick adoption to Haswell-EX not because of AVX2 or DDR4 but rather transactional memory support (TSX). For the large databases and applications these systems are targeted at, TSX should prove to be helpful.
  • TiGr1982 - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link

    I agree, TSX should make a lot of sense for these E7's - they have a huge core count and huge shared memory at the same time.
  • Schmide - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link

    I think your L3 latency numbers are off. I think typical Intel L3 latencies are 30-40 clocks ~3-4ns.
  • Schmide - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link

    Oops my bad i miss used the calculator. Ignore.
  • dylan522p - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link

    No power consumption numbers?
  • JohanAnandtech - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link

    Coming...we had to run lots of test in parallel, so it was not possible to make sure all systems were similar. Also we should test with workloads that require a lot more memory to get an idea.
  • mslasm - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link

    Note that E7-8857 v2 has 12 cores but no HT, so only has 12 threads as well (see http://ark.intel.com/products/75254/Intel-Xeon-Pro... Thus it is not equivalent to a 3Ghz E7-4860V2, as 4860 has HT for a total of 24 threads

    Also, there must be a typo either in the graph or in the text on the "single thread" integer performance test: "Opteron ... at 2.4GHz would deliver about 2481 MIPs", while - according to the graph - it already delivers 2636 @ 2.3Ghz.
  • JohanAnandtech - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link

    Good point. There is little gain from HT in OpenFoam, but it will influence the LZMA benchmarks. So the Openfoam findings are still valid, but not the LZMA. The kernel compile is somewhat in between.
  • JohanAnandtech - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link

    I will rerun the benchmarks without HT to check.
  • mslasm - Saturday, February 22, 2014 - link

    Thanks! I did not mean to imply HT matters "a lot", but it may influence some (and I admit I don't know much about how your benchmarks behave, other than parallel LZMA which I worked a lot with) - so it just does not sound right to outright call it equivalent, and I wish AT only has statements anyone can just trust :)

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