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Anyone crunching on a Xeon E5-2696 V4 CPU?

Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2017 9:14 pm
by chriscambridge
Hi,

Is anyone running any Xeon E5-2696 V4 CPUs (or Xeon E5-2699 V4 which is the retail version).

If so I would be interested in hearing how it performs..

These are the most powerful V4 Xeons you can buy so I am expecting them to be pretty powerful.

22 cores / 44 Threads / Base 2.2 Ghz / Turbo 3.8 Ghz / All cores 2.8 Ghz / TDP 145w/150w

Thanks

Re: Anyone crunching on a Xeon E5-2696 V4 CPU?

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 7:34 pm
by chriscambridge
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Re: Anyone crunching on a Xeon E5-2696 V4 CPU?

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 9:09 pm
by UBT - Timbo
Hi Chris,

Now that is pretty awesome - 44 threads for TDP of about 150W !!

Not so long ago, Intel were doing well to provide 2 cores for around 120W - ok, so maybe it was nearly 20 years ago (Pentium P4)...

Even so, "CPU" design has come a long way and multi-core CPU's are the "norm" (at last) - I was predicting that dual and quad cores would be the norm a long time ago, (as I could see that chasing the "speed" function was going to have to stop, due to the die size and the frequency/temperature limits).

And now it seems the the race for the fastest CPU is pretty much over, and now it's down to maximising the number of cores on each die.

I wonder at what point M$ will make a parallel processing compliant OS (as opposed to the time sliced type they've sold/given away until now)?

regards
Tim

Re: Anyone crunching on a Xeon E5-2696 V4 CPU?

Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 9:37 pm
by chriscambridge
Hi Tim,

Yeah even the latest Core CPUs seem to be stuck at around 4 Ghz speed ish.

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I agree 22 cores @ 2.8 Ghz for 150w on a single chip is pretty impressive. Especially as you can pick them up used for over 75% off the retail price of over £4,000 each.

Gamers talk about the speed of the i7/i9's however if you add up the total speed of say this Xeon to the best i7/i9 there is no comparison on total output (Ignoring overclocking abilities), or TDP.

Xeon E5-2696V4
44 * 2.8 GHz = 123.2 GHz
150w

Core i9-7900X
20 * 3.8 Ghz = 76 Ghz
140w

Core i7-8700K
12 * 4.2 Ghz = 50.4 Ghz
95w

** Core i7 and Core i9 all core speed has been estimated **

Although there is something that Mark pointed out that which I totally agree; A key reason you would want one of the faster Core i7/i9 CPUs is if you were running multiple GPUs say in a rack/box, as then you would then want the fastest freq per thread, rather than total thread output, so you didn't bottleneck the system).

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I think the new V5 Xeons however are taking this output to even better levels. Pity they are currently selling for $10,000 each!

Xeon Platinum 8180
56 * 2.9 Ghz = 162.4 Ghz
205w

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The last OS I covered in depth was Windows NT as part of my Comp.Sci studies.. Things have moved on a lot since then.

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What I am looking forward to, if ever, is building a dual box with these V4 Xeons. Imagine that, 88 threads running at once!

The only problem with so many cores is some projects, such as Rosetta, you need quite a lot of RAM else you get 'out of memory suspended tasks'; on one CPU you need more than 16Gb to run all 44 task, so on two CPUs you would probably need 40+ Gb which is quite expensive as its DDR4 EEC RAM.

Re: Anyone crunching on a Xeon E5-2696 V4 CPU?

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2017 1:13 am
by scole of TSBT
The Xeon V4 CPUs smoke on project apps which use AVX/AVX2. Run some SRBase. There are other projects which also take advantage of AVX/AVX2 optimized apps too. TN-Grid might be one also.

Note: When running AVX/AVX2 apps, the threads may downclock a few hundred Hz but the performance gain of AVX more than makes up for the downclock.

Also, these CPUs support quad channel memory so use all 4 channels. 4 sticks per CPU and don't use more than 4 sticks per CPU.

Re: Anyone crunching on a Xeon E5-2696 V4 CPU?

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2017 1:24 am
by chriscambridge
Thanks Scole that's useful to know.

I had heard that AVX/AVX2 was a real game changer due to the fact it uses vectors (rather than arrays).

I had yet to actually find a project that uses it though so the heads up on SRBase and possible TN-Grid is helpful.

I also run E5-283V3 Xeon's which if I remember rightly also have AVX/AVX2 instruction sets.

Quad channel RAM in place.