Intel Xeon E5-2660 Processor

The Romley EP Qual platform was earlier codenamed as the SandyBridge EP platform. It is a multi-socket capable platform that is designed for high-performance servers and workstations

We reviewed the CPU using the Intel server system R2208GZ4GSSPP which came equipped with 128 GB DD3 RAM, expandable to 768 GB. The system also had the Intel 200 GB 2.5 inch SSD mounted on an airduct inside the server. The front panel storage bay was equipped with another 200 GB Intel SSD. Our server is a 2-way server cooled by 5 redundant hot swap system fans. The Intel server system R2208GZ4GSSPP is a 2-way server with an LGA 2011 socket.

About the CPU

The processor, which runs at 2.2 GHz, is an 8 core multi-threaded CPU, which means it's capable of providing 16 threads for a high degree of parallel processing. The processors share 20 MB of L3 cache amongst themselves, which is supposed to translate to faster compute capabilities. As discussed, the processor is compatible with the the LGA 2011 socket.

Performance

We installed Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit) on the test server for running benchmarks. Cinebench 11.5 and the Financial Risk Analysis application benchmark called Sungard were used. The application allows you to select the number of threads to use, which essentially controls how much CPU power to extract from the system. The application uses a Monte Carlo method financial engine to determine the future value of a fictitious portfolio. We ran this test with 8, 16 and 32 threads. The time taken to determine the future value of the portfolio reduces significantly as the number of threads increase. The system took 170 secs for completing the processing of the workload when 8 threads were working. This number reduced sharply to around 81 seconds when the full computing capability of 32 threads was utilized for the process. CineBench gave an excellent score of 19.88 CPU points. This is excellent performance considering the fact that there were only 16 physical cores on our server system which were used to compile the test. Compared with the earlier Dunnington server (18.58 CPU points), it fared extremely well even though the Dunnington system had 24 cores running inside. Westmere EX powered Intel QSSC-S4R gave a score of 19.59 CPU points even though it had 40 cores and the processors were running at 2.66 GHz as compared to the 2.20 GHz on our system. The CPU frequency provides some advantage in performance.

Bottomline: The intel Xeon E5 is indeed an efficient family of server CPUs. The E5-2660 gave good performance results as compared to the previous generation CPUs. The performance was little lesser as compared to the other CPU from the same family, but that could be attributed to the CPU frequency being low.