A Few Thoughts on the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family

The original article is here: Intel® Xeon® Processor Scalable Family Technical Overview.

This quick post is for the time challenged folks trying to figure things out as far as how the new Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family relates to the previous generation Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 series.

Please note that all of the images below are from the above article.

The above grid gives us an idea of which processor grade goes where. Our standard go-to has been the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2620 through the E5-2640 which were at one time the mainstream processors.

The next tier for us would be the E5-26*3 and E5-26*7 series that provided high bin counts (GHz) with low core counts.

Now we can see that the mainstream processors are Silver and the performance grade are Gold.

In the charge above 2S, 4S, 8S is the number of sockets the processor supports. DPC is DIMMs Per Channel.

As we can see, there are just a few new features included in the new processor family.

Some Thoughts

There is a definite glaring omission in this new processor family: Fourth Generation PCIe :(

As we all know, the data bus is playing catch-up (blog post) to storage and to some extent networking.

While the newly introduced Purley platform has integrated PCIe NVMe ports on the server boards and backplanes there is still a lack of clarity as far as what we need to make things work on the Intel Server System platform.

The PCIe channel count bump from 32 to 48 is most certainly not enough especially with the spec stuck in Generation 3. A pair of 100Gb Mellanox Ethernet cards and a few PCIe NVMe SSDs and we're pretty much saturating the bus ... again.

And one more thing as we've not had a chance to compare apples to apples yet, the new processors look to be more expensive than the previous generation E5-2600v4 equivalents. And, it seems as the core counts go up so do the prices in an almost exponential way.

We'll post some price comparisons in another blog post.

Have a great weekend and thanks for reading!

Philip Elder
Microsoft High Availability MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
Our Cloud Service

Hyper-V: Number of NUMA Nodes on a Dual Intel Xeon E5-2630 R2208GZ4GC

Here is a snip of the number of NUMA Nodes in a newly stood up Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard server with a pair of Intel Xeon E5-2630 CPUs in the Intel Server Systems Grizzly Pass 2U setup:

Here is the same setup showing the number of Cores/Threads:

Note that we do not have Hyper-Threading turned off on this particular server.

It's important to note that a VM that is set up with more vCPUs than cores on one CPU may actually perform poorer than the same VM set up with the vCPU setting equal to or one less than the number of cores available on one CPU.

This is what is meant by spanning NUMA nodes.

Suffice it to say we can spend a while discussing the performance impact of too many vCPUs assigned to one VM. Ultimately, one needs to stress test a VM setup using a variety of configurations to find what will be optimal for that particular VM.

Happy New Year's Eve everyone. All the best for 2014! :)

Philip Elder
Microsoft MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
Third Tier: Enterprise Solutions for Small Business