Quad Xeon 7500, the Best Virtualized Datacenter Building Block?

Conclusion

The first impression that the Xeon 7500 series made on the world was seriously blurred. Part of the reason is that the testing platform had a firmware bug that decreased the memory bandwidth by 20% and more. Another reason were the weird benchmarking choices of reviewers. Lightwave, folding@home and Cinebench were somehow popular measuring sticks portraying the Xeon X7560 as the more expensive and at the same time slower brother of the Xeon X5670. That kind of software is run mostly on sub $4000 workstations and cheap 1U server farms, and we seriously doubt that anyone in their right mind would spend $30,000 on a server to run these kind of workloads.

Our own benchmarking was not complete either, as our virtualization benchmarking fell short of giving 32—let alone 64—threads enough work. Still, the impressive SAP S&D benchmark numbers, one of the most reliable and most relevant industry standard benchmarks out there, made it clear to us that we should give the Xeon X7560 another chance to prove itself.

Our new virtualization benchmark vApus Mark II shows that we should give credit where it is due: servers based on the X7560 are really impressive when consolidating services using virtualization: a quad Xeon X7560 can offer 2.3 times better performance than the best dual socket systems today! You might even call the performance numbers historical: for the first time in history, Intel’s multi-socket servers run circles around the dual socket servers. Remember how the quad Xeon 7200 hardly outperformed the dual Xeon 5300 at the end of 2006, and how the quad 7400 was humiliated by the dual Xeon X5500 in 2009? And even if we go even further back in history, the Xeon MP never outperformed the dual socket offerings by a large margin. Memory capacity and RAS features were almost always the main selling points. For the first time, scalability is more than just a hollow phrase; a Xeon X7560 server can replace two or more smaller servers in terms of memory capacity and processing power.

The end result is that these servers can be attractive for people who are not the traditional high-end server buyers. Using a few quad Xeon X7560 servers instead of a lot of dual socket servers to consolidate your software services may turn out to be a very healthy strategy. Based on our current data, two quad Xeon X7560 ($65k- $70k) are worth about five Xeon 5600 servers ($50k-$65k). The acquisitions costs are slightly higher, but you need fewer physical servers and that lowers the management costs somewhat. There are two questions that remain:

1) How bad or good is the power/performance ratio?

2) If RAS is not your top priority, does a quad Opteron 6174 make more sense?

A Dell R815 with four twelve-core Opteron 6174 processors has arrived in our labs. So our search for the best virtualization building block continues.

A big thanks to Tijl Deneut and Dieter Vandroemme.