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Intel Releases Xeon, Look At Those Kernels Compile
Nelly Furtado writes "AnandTech has the scoop on Intel's new Xeon processor that was just released today in dual processor form. The review includes Linux kernel compilation tests as well as database server performance measurements. The article also hints at Jackson Technology (SMT) and AMD's 760MP chipset."
Quoting Linus: "A single "-j3" won't do much. It will only build three directories at a time, and you'll never see much load. But doing it recursively means that you'll build three at a time all the way out to the leaf directories."
The testers used make -j2 bzImage, which didn't make full use of the machine's capabilities.
Am I the only one who thought those particular benchmarks extremely worthless? Where's the "10,000 client mail-server" benchmarks, or some other thing people would actually use a dual pentium 4 Xeon system for?
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
So it doesn't offer much improvement over the PIV eh. That's nothing 5000 layoffs can't fix. It certainly looks exotic, like the ISA expansion panels of the late 80's. Either way I expect they'll have to pull a Cisco to return to profitability. Preferrably on the campus by 101. And keep the suicides off the freeway.
In other words, the official announcement of dual Athlon availability is imminent, and Intel is making a pathetic attempt to steal some of AMDs thunder. Amusingly, today the price-per-share gap between Intel and AMD grew to 4-1/2 points.
Apache repsonse time. Have some scripts and or servlets which are more processor intensive than bandwidth intensive. They do exists.
MySQL (or appropriate) - Are the processors available so fast as compared to disk I/O that we could see improvements over different chips in equivalent systems?
A combination of the first 2
Would I rather run Blender, 3DSMax 4, Adobe Premiere 6, and Adobe After Effects 5 on a P90 or a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 (or a Gig+ Athlon)?
Hmmm, let me thing about that for a moment...
Don't discount multimedia work as "not for your average user", either. With most common desktop OSes (Mac OS9/OSX and Windows ME) shipping with video production software and photo-editing tools graphic manipulation speed is squarely in the realm of the average user's needs now.
... wasn't made by the engineering team, but by their marketing department. They managed to convince the world that the following foolishness was actually the truth:
CPU clock speed == CPU speed
And, judging simply by the title of the article, they are now attempting to convince the journalists of the world that:
CPU clock speed == Workstation Power
Hmm... I wonder if there's a better CPU for workstations and servers out there.... Moreover, I wonder if anyone whose chip design knowledge goes beyond the buzzwords has given any awards for the best Workstation/Server CPU architecture. Are we ever going to get back to reality in terms of computer processing power? Or, have the marketing people succeeded in snuffing out another truth?
--Mid
Remember the source of this "information" - Anandtech. *ahem* Intel bias *ahem*
Of course seperate northbridge - CPU buses can't hide the fact that there's only limited bandwidth to any given resource, but it's unlikely that multiple CPUs are contending for the same resource at any time.
The only trouble I have with thr 760 MP (same as for any GHz SMP system) is that the power requirements are so high that you need an expensive power supply too.
The importance of the kernel compile time is that it serves as a measure of compile times in general, which is quite a reasonable benchmark for programmers.
I would say the office and gaming benchmarks are also reasonable, since probably most of the readers (at least many of them) will never run a database on their computer, but may be tempted to buy the latest and greatest chip, only to find out that it's slower than an athlon at 2/3 the clock speed.
I personally am glad they ran enough tests to show that the pentium is still behind the athlon on FP performance, which is the only thing I care about (except perhaps compile time), as I run floating point stuff at work (physics stuff).
then I went to a 486-50
then a P90
then a P2-333
now I'm running a P3-1GHZ
Each has lasted 3 to 4 years, however I have upgraded other components in the boxes. Added hard drives and memory about every 1.5 years, replaced video cards and modems every year. But the latest system will probably only get one upgrade in its life when a reasonably priced DVD burner (whose DVDs work on my DVD player) comes out. My CD burner is Good Enough, even after 3 years. I have 30 GB of hard drive, on two drives, and use about 10 of that. The 256 MB of ram is plenty. The ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon does MP2 recording in real time.
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> You upgrade when you cant stand your old machine anymore and the new one you buy will be at least 4 times faster.
:)
:)
:)
:)
:) *
Four times? I tend to get a cpu twice as fast as my old one (on Mhz and Benchmarks.)
> Seems to be around a 3 year cycle.
Yeah, that's about right.
My upgrade schedule was:
Apple, 1 Mhz
XT, 4 Mhz
286, 12 Mhz
386sx, 16 Mhz
Pentium, 100 Mhz
Pentium Pro, (180 o/c to 200
Dual Cel 550s (366 o/c to 550
Athlon 1.2 Ghz (not o/c as I prefer 100% stable)
My upgrade schedule has been around every 2 to 3 years as well.
Currently, I'm not upgrading for another 2 years when 2+ Ghz machines are out (Just upgraded back in Feb. Probably will upgrade the GeForce 2 first though next year.)
> and Im not very easily impressed by gee-whiz-gotta-have-that hardware anymore.
I hear ya. As you get older, computers just don't have the same "magic" or "pizzaz". (I grew up with an 8-bit 1 Mhz Apple ][ w/ 64k. Now we have video cards with 64 Megs of ram. Times sure change
i.e. P4 1.5 Ghz. Yeah, so. It's not THAT MUCH faster then an Athlon 1.2.
Don't get me wrong, I still want faster hardware, but it just doesn't phase me the same way when I got my 386sx-16.
e.g.
Cant' wait for 3D graphics to look just as good as 2D. I want a real 3D MMPRG to make Quake 3 look like Donkey Kong.
* Can't waiting for the GeForce 3 to become "bottom end" / ubiqiutous
Cheers
Hmmm. Were you confused when I said RISC chips like the Sparc? Ok, obviously the Pentium is a RISC core with a CISC emmulations, and the lines everywhere have been blurred. Let me rephrase RISC with "high-end server chips". Are you still confused? You should never buy a chip that handles 1/1000 situations. However, high load is a fairly predictable and common situation for many of the more demanding server roles these days. I get the feeling /.'s database (quad Xeons) probably runs under fairly continous load during the day. Do you think they screwed up and they should downgrade to regular pentiums? From the performance I've seen today on /. they should be considering a 64bit chip with better throughput on all of their servers.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I remember working at a place where this guy was complaining that some timing tests he ran on these E250's running 350Mhz Sparc II's vs. 450Mhz PIIIs clearly favored the PIII. I told him that his test was meaningless because he was not running the systems under full load. When I demonstrated by essentially DOSing the two systems with SSL requests, he saw how the throughput tends to smoke clockspeed in the end. High end chips come down to saturation performance. Of course compare a Xeon to pure RISC chip like the Sparc under these high load conditions and you'll see similar results. Clock speed loses to throughput under load.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Can you do real-time editing of the digital video clips you downloaded from your digital video camera? Do you even have enough storage for that kind of content? Didn't think so.
The need for speed does not ramp up continuously. I'll agree with that. But certain classes of applications require quantum leaps of processing power. We've gone from blinking LED's to text to still images (with hints of motion thrown in for effect). But today's computers cannot reasonably be expected to handle high-bandwidth streaming multimedia except in fits and starts. They will though, and this will require more horsepower. Much more than even this processor improvement provides.
So don't say "No one with a modern computer will ever need to upgrade". Amend that to "You might consider waiting until you'll really be able to notice the difference." Because depending on what you're doing, you really may notice the difference.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
In case you don't know what Jackson Technology is, here's an article over at Tech-report. However, is appears that Intel has sold their soul to Lucifer. Ah well, let 'em join the ranks of other companies to have done the same. :-)
http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/1947
Of course, make oldconfig would do the job just as well.
Incidentally, Linux 2.5 will feature CML2, developed by ESR and friends, to make the configure and compile process more dynamic. The number of threads to be used will no longer have to be specified by the user as the system will discover this automatically.
The vapours from the dual-Athlon hardware will clearly overwhelm this real operating hardware.
To quote the last paragraph of the article:
"The real question on everyone's mind is how does the i860 and the Intel Xeon compare to the upcoming 760MP and the Athlon 4? We have been benchmarking that very combination for weeks now and soon enough we will be able to provide you with the definitive answer in many more test scenarios than those we just presented to you."
Yup, just vapor. You moron, dual Athlons motherboards have been out for months, and everyone who has one is under NDA. Do you think Anandtech went out to Best Buy and got a P4 Xeon? P4 Xeons will probably not be available from anyone for at least a few weeks commercially: Intel gave them one, they benchmarked it, and when they got the OK from Intel they released the results.
But forget office applications, no one is buying a new computer to edit text. How about games. Take the "frames per second" indicator in 3D simulations, it still very far from the ideal. The computer of my dreams would be able to do 60 frames per second when ray-tracing a scene with 100 million objects. And at the same time, it should also have the capacity to solve partial differential equations fast enough to simulate waves hitting a beach, accurately calculating the position of all the bubbles in the surf, and all the grains of sand. And how about strectching and deformation of solid materials: when will Lara Croft have a natural-looking smile in her face?
Flashback: 1989 - Intel releases the i860 64-bit microprocessor, dubbed a "Cray on a chip" (okay, so it was only a Cray 1, and I think it was only a third as quick as that, but hey - it's a "Cray"!) I even remember some of the RMIT ubergeeks designing a kick-ass computer based upon the i860... Unfortunately, I don't think it was ever built.
2001 - Intel releases the "i860" chipset to support the latest of its flagging 32-bit microprocessor range. Intel's 64-bit microprocessor, the "Itanium", is due for release real soon now...
</irony>
I'm starting to think that we need a system where *every* slashdot reader has the opportunity to moderate any message as "incorrectly moderated as 'funny'" and likewise for the other options. The amont of scoring a moderator gets would effect how often he or she gets moderation again. This also favors new blood since first time moderators would have the highest possible score (0 bad points). On the other side, some type of aging would have to be present so that active moderators aren't disproportionately hurt. In any event, I think the current system has to change.
AMD's cpu's are less expensive and give a MUCH better performance for their price than an Intel PIII or PIV.
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It is of course impressive that Intel made it run at 1.7GHz, but given this, the benchmarks are quite what could be expected. The Xeon is intended for High-End workstations and servers. I dont think many people will actually choose a system, just becaues it is Xeon-based (the OEM has made the choice).
When buying servers the CPUs are not really the most important thing (at least now where I work - we focus on disk/RAID/memory and takes whatever CPU comes with it, and maybe double it). If CPU is really important (massive database, scientific applications etc) 64-bit CPUs or vector machines might be more adequate even though the operate at lower clock freq.
Most Xeons will be in Windows (and of course, Linux/BSD) servers. On these servers PIII/Thunderbird is not really an option anyway.
So, what I have wanted to say all the time is that I'd rather see a benchmark/comparision between UltraSparcs, Alphas and Xeons.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sorry, it was gonna happen eventually.
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For those of you who can't be bothered to read the entire article, the most interesting part by far is the real-world database benchmark towards the end. The 1.2GHz Athlon places right smack in the middle between the single Xeon and the dual Xeon (both 1.7GHz).
That makes it highly likely that a dual Athlon will significantly outperform the dual Xeon, does it not?
Even though dual Athlon systems aren't available yet, I'm willing to bet that when they are, the price tag of one such system will quickly drop far below the price tag of one of those dual Xeon beasties.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
The person who uses all that io for quake and photoshop needs to be hanged by their toenails. I suppose anand has to put those type stats in so the 'gamer' community has something to relate to but in this instance it's not really relavent is it? This isn't a 'pc' processor. Some of the benchmarks there are silly is speed of kernel compile really that important? All that matters to me is that it compiles properly and in a relatively timely manner. Office suite benchmarks just get filed with the rest of the fluff, in short this review should have been more in context with the processor (the database stuff was good).
I am a bioinformatics graduate student who IS processing data from the genome project in his spare time.
I regularly run jobs on supercomputers.
Often, I bring work home with me, because it's more comfy there. Last fall, I bought a Pentium 1 Ghz w / 384 Mb RAM.
I frequently kick myself for not buying more RAM (I'll probably upgrade to >=512 Mb soon), and yes, the difference between 1 and 2 Ghz matters to me.
I might represent a small proportion of users, but to us, it makes all the difference to have home computing systems pushed to the limits of performance and affordability.
Sure you don't need more speed now, but remember someone-or-other's law: Software will expand to consume all available resources.
My Apple ][+ had 48k of RAM, and somehow still managed to do all sorts of cool stuff. And although it was probably about four orders of magnitude slower than my current machine, it didn't feel that much slower. Somehow, modern software manages to use resources at rates that we would hardly have dreamed of in 1980.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's easy to blame programmers for being lazy, but they're actually making intelligent decisions that lead to ever-increasing resource use. Every new increase in speed or memory opens up options that just hadn't been there before -- scripting languages, multitasking, multiple users, OOP, application frameworks, garbage collection...all made possible because there was a little power to spare. OS X uses gobs and gobs of memory double-buffering everything on the screen, which is just fine with me -- memory is so cheap they gave me 256 megs free when I got my machine, and the UI looks really cool for all the extra RAM it uses.
So hang in there. I'm sure somebody will find a way to burn up all the power your hardware can muster. And oddly, it will probably be worth it.
Yeah! but the Intel chip looks much nicer in dimed light.