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Server CPU: Intel's Xeon E5-2690-Romley EP Qual Processor

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PANKAJ
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Snapshot

Price: NA

Key Specs: Latest Romley EP Qual Intel Xeon E5 processor, 2.9 GHz clock speed

Pros: Excellent performance

Cons: None

Contact: Intel India

Write: pcquest@cybermedia.co.in with name of product in subject, for more info.

We received the latest Romley EP Qual Intel Xeon E5 processor for review in our lab. The CPU was housed in a 2U high, 2-way Intel R2208GZ4GSSPP server system. The Romley EP Qual platform was earlier codenamed as the SandyBridge EP platform. The Romley EP Qual multi-socket capable platform is designed for high-performance servers and workstations.

About the CPU

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The test system, Intel server system R2208GZ4GSSPP, comes equipped with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors placed on a LGA 2011 socket. Due to the fact that the processor is based on a new socket, one would not be able to simply replace an older processor with the new one. To be able to harness the power of the new platform, one would have to purchase a new server with a motherboard which supports the new LGA2011 socket.

The processor, which runs at 2.9 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. Please refer to the processor family comparison table for other offerings in the E5-2600 family.

The test server we received came equipped with 128 GB DD3 RAM, expandable to 768 GB. The system also had 200 GB, Intel 2.5 inch SSD mounted in an airduct inside the server. There is a provision for connecting 2 such disks which could come in handy if the front bay is not populated with storage. The front panel of the server houses an 8 x 2.5 inch drive support panel which can support HDDs or SSDs as required. The front panel storage bay was equipped with another 200 GB Intel SSD taking the total up to 2. Our server was a 2 way server cooled by 5 redundant hot swap system fans. The system is powered by two 750W high efficiency power supplies in a redundant configuration. The PSUs are hot-swappable too.

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Performance

We installed Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit) on our test server for trying out some of the 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 142 secs for completing the processing of the workload when 8 threads were working. This number reduced sharply to around 69 seconds when the full computing capability of 80 threads was utilized for the process. CineBench gave a fantastic score of 24 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 2.90 GHz on our system. The CPU frequency provides a minor advantage in performance.

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Server CPUs Across Generations Compared

Processor Processor codename Manufacturing process (nm) Max cores Max L3 cache Clock speed (GHz)

Benchmark scores



Cinebench 11.5       Sungard (sec)

Intel Xeon E5-2690

Romley EP Qual 32 8 20 2.9 24.03 69
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Intel Xeon E7 4870 Westmere-EX 32 10 30 2.4 19.59 120 Intel Xeon X7560 Nehalem EX 45 8 24 2.27 14.81 99 AMD Opteron 6174 Magny Cours 45 12 12 2.2 14.7 NA Intel Xeon 7400 Dunnington 45 6 16 2.66 18.58 106



Availability

The new platform from Intel already finds adoption in the vendor community. We found Dell servers like the Poweredge M620 and T620 amongst others already providing the Xeon E5 series processor on board. Other vendors would also be shipping the new processor family based servers pretty soon.

Server CPUs Across Generations Compared

Processor Cores/

Threads
Frequency (GHz) L3 cache (MB) TDP (W)

E5-2630

6 / 12 2.3 15 95
E5-2650L 8 / 12 1.8 20 70
E5-2640 6 / 12 2.5 15 95
E5-2650 8 / 12 2 20 95
E5-2667 6 / 12 2.9 15 1.30
E5-2660 8 / 12 2.2 20 95
E5-2665 8 / 12 2.4 20 115
E5-2670 8 / 12 2.6 20 115
E5-2680 8 / 12 2.7 20 130
E5-2687W 8 / 12 3.1 20 150
E5-2690 8 / 12 2.9 20 135



Bottomline

Based on the results one can conclude that the E5-2690 based server system is indeed a performance beast. It runs more on less with lesser resources and this speaks volumes for its efficiency.

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