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Intel Lindenhurst Xeon DP Platform Discussion

Posted by Zonk on from the i-love-talking-i/o dept.

Steve from Hexus writes "Hexus.net has a article looking at Intel's latest Xeon platform: Lindenhurst, discussing the Paxville dual-core processor, E7520 core-logic, where it could go right for Intel, and where it could all go wrong." From the article: "If you're I/O bound by your threads in any way, you can hit problems (all threads touch the MCH, then there's a 266MiB/sec bus link to the I/O processors to cross, then the data hits disks or network hardware). If you're memory subsystem bound in any way, especially on a majority of compute threads, performance is likely gone. There's just too much resource sharing for it to all conceivably work well, especially compared to Opteron. I can forsee many a scenario where dual-core Opteron will give Paxville Xeon DP a beating."

9 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Terrible naming by Killjoy_NL · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Lindenhurst, Paxville.

    Who takes these names serious these days?

    Pentium, Athlon, those are good names, just keep on following this pattern.

    --
    This is the sig that says NI (again)
  2. why I don't build a new PC... by pointbeing · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Got a plain old dual processor 1GHz box that with video and hard drive upgrades is still competent. It does everything I need it to do, although processor- or memory-intensive processes are getting a bit sluggish. Rendering video takes a little time, but that's more because the application I use renders in a single thread - but I can play games and render video at the same time ;-)

    I still believe if you could remove all the latency from I/O subsystems in a modern PC you'd have more processor than you could use by a longshot - IMO high-end PCs just wait for data faster than older machines, and a lot of the performance boost you see with a new machine is simply masking latency in other subsystems.

    PCI-X and improved memory bandwidth will solve some of these problems, but it's a bandaid at best. I do tend to chuckle at people buying the newest/fastest peripheral, not understanding that a lot of the time the peripheral will talk faster than the nine(?) year-old PCI bus that's feeding it.

    When troubleshooting performance issues the component that's working at 100% capacity is *always* the bottleneck - and with most home and business users, that bottleneck is almost never the CPU itself.

    --
    we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
    -- anais nin
  3. Re:gooooo Intel! by IAmTheDave · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The fact they're STILL making Netburst based processors just sickens me. Give it up already and go P6 or something new. I mean if they put half the money they put into the netburst into the P6 designs of late they'd already have a 2.5Ghz P6 core that would give AMD a run for their money.

    Agreed. What ever happened to Intel leading the pack? Their processors are bloated, slow, and quite unfortunately behind the curve.

    --
    Excuse my speling.
    Making The Bar Project
  4. Pointless? by plumby · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'll admit that I'm no great expert on the details of multi-core, hyper-threaded CPU design, but from what's in the article isn't the memory access bottleneck a rather fatal, and obvious, flaw in the whole design? Unless I'm missing something, I'm really struggling to see how this got off the drawing board. What is it's point if the only applications that can ever take advantage of it are the very few that rarely need to access main memory?

    1. Re:Pointless? by magarity · · Score: 2, Insightful

      isn't the memory access bottleneck a rather fatal, and obvious, flaw in the whole design? Unless I'm missing something
       
      What you're missing is that Intel's PC CPU business is all about the CPU. The chipset and all that other tedious little stuff is just there only because it has to be for the CPU to function. Their entire focus is CPU, CPU, CPU. Look how fast it runs through clock cycles! Look how many cores and pseudo-cores (HT) it has! They've been doing this for ages. Recall the first generation of Pentium 2's had to deal with PPro chipsets because introducing a new chipset for a new CPU took a far back corner burner to the new CPU itself as long as it could be made to function.

  5. Re:gooooo Intel! by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They invested too heavily on the Mhz-myth of the Netburst. To turn around and say "whoops, we're wrong" is hard. That and they have partners that ALSO invested in it.

    What does Dell use? "Dell uses Intel Pentium four processors (cue P4 sound theme)" ...

    It's probably not easy to say "Dell uses Intel P6 processors because the P4 sucks ass, we're sorry, we lied all this time." There is also a huge cultural gap between the engineers and marketters/VPs. I'm sure if any of the engineers escaped and bought an AMD64 box they would be envious. Provided of course, they're not full of their own shit to see outside their little box.

    Truth be told I'd love to try a ~2.4Ghz PentiumM as a desktop processor. It's probably loads faster than a 1.8Ghz sempron and can hold it's own on the power usage front. It would make a great work station or compute box. Upgrade the core to x86_64 and they'd be set.

    Alas, they are their own undoing.

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  6. Re:gooooo Intel! by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "The fact they're STILL making Netburst based processors just sickens me."

    So?

    The reason that Intel is still making Netburst processors is because chip development is a lot slower than the "speed of internet". Figure two to three years from concept to production. AMD took that long or longer to put out their A64 line. This is why Intel can't make large architecture shifts in a month.

  7. Re:gooooo Intel! by cowbutt · · Score: 3, Insightful
    They invested too heavily on the Mhz-myth of the Netburst. To turn around and say "whoops, we're wrong" is hard. That and they have partners that ALSO invested in it.

    Saying 'MHz-myth of the Netburst' is a bit harsh. There was a time when it made sense - if it allows Intel to sell processors that perform faster than AMD's and retail for similar prices, who cares about the clock speed required to do this? Heck, this was pretty much DEC's strategy for the Alpha - design an architecture that's easily scalable to ever-faster clock speeds, and ramp up the performance by aggressively increasing the clock speed.

    But it was short-sighted of Intel to over-invest in such a strategy without any guarantees about power consumption, consequent heat output, or the growing importance of those issues to its customers.

    In the long run, though, this won't kill Intel, and they'll be back. I'd also expect them to learn from the experience, the same way that after the infamous Pentium FP bug, every processor has had field-upgradeable microcode to (hopefully) eliminate the chance that they'll need to perform a recall of that size - and expense - ever again.

  8. Slashdot posts anything these days by tayhimself · · Score: 4, Insightful
    GamePC has real benchmarks showing the Paxville Xeons getting blown away by Opterons. http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=pax ville&page=1&cookie_test=1/

    The Hexus article is just a summary of their results along with several inaccuracies.

    If you're I/O bound by your threads in any way, you can hit problems (all threads touch the MCH, then there's a 266MiB/sec bus link to the I/O processors to cross, then the data hits disks or network hardware). If you're memory subsystem bound in any way, especially on a majority of compute threads, performance is likely gone.
    This is misleading. First off, the MCH is a 6.4 GB/s link so I dont understand how it could bottleneck I/O even if you're compute bound. The 266 MB/s IO bus is for legacy peripherals (USB/serial/SATA). Considering SATA-I (what the ICH5R supports) is 150 MB/s per channel, and USB is 400 Mb/s I cant see how this is a big problem. If you want fast (SCSI/FibreChannel/SATA-OII HW raid) disks and network, there are PCI-X 64bit and PCIe x4, x8 slots that you can have your important I/O subsystem hanging off of.

    Here is a link to the intel datasheets for the chipsets which shows 3 x8 PCIe interfaces for the 7520 and 1 for the 7320. http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/E7520_E7320 /

    All that being said, the CPU itself is a dog.