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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."

1 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. 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.