Zeon W,
Zeon scalable.
You know, they're both called Xeon,
but these things are really different.
One of them is basically a Core i9 with
ECC memory support and the other one is
a server CPU that I fanled all over
because I love super high-end expensive
tech toys. Now, in the past, you needed multiple
CPUs in one multi-socketed motherboard
in order to handle intensive multi-threaded workloads. But is that
still the case today? Do you still need
two of these given that a single Xeon
Platinum 8180 is 28 cores and 56 threads
on a single chip? Well, I don't know
what is the purpose today of a dual
socket machine like this one and how much have single high core count CPUs
eroded the market that they used to enjoy? Let's find out, shall we?
All right, there's a lot more room down here and we are going to need it for
this honking, not to mention heavy test bench. On this
test bench, you will find the ASUS C621E
Sage. This is a dual socket motherboard
rocking two LGA 3647 sockets for Intel's
Xeon scalable lineup of CPUs. And setups
like this have actually been around as far back as the 486 in 1989
with the resulting secondhand hardware giving enthusiasts the ability to get
multiple physical cores in their homes
over the years with the peak being somewhere in the mid 2000s or so. But
that was then and this is now. Now you
can get multiple processing cores in a
single chip. So
to see how far things have come, what we're going to do is pit this machine
against the fastest single CPU that
we've tested to date. We're going to try to keep the number of variables to a
minimum in order to gauge the impact that these extra CPU cores will have on
our setup. Though, it should be noted that there aren't many options when it
comes to aftermarket LGA3647
coolers because most of the folks
selling these kinds of systems would figure out their own solution. So, that
means that our dual socket workstation will run a little bit toasty, but we
didn't observe any thermal throttling, so it shouldn't affect our performance.
Let's start off then with good oldfashioned
Cinebench. I mean, we've we've seen this run before, but it's always fun to see
it finish that quickly.
So, in a surprise to no one, the dual
socket machine is faster. But
considering its 56
processing cores, not all of our workloads scale in the way that we might
expect. 7zip, for example, shows a
smaller thanex expected gain over our Core i9 Extreme Edition, and YC Cruncher
even finds itself losing ground. ASUS
Realbench demonstrates this, though, with that said, the encoding benchmark
ees out a lead over our Core i9 7980XE.
and then Blender. Well, here we actually get a victory for our dual CPU system
again, showing this platform's potential
for expanding render farms.
But what is really going on here? Well,
something you guys have to realize is that there is more to a dual socket
configuration than just more cores. Do
you remember when AMD managed a 3%
improvement in IPC with second gen Ryzen
just by improving cache latency? So on
this motherboard, we've got two separate CPUs with two separate sets of cache and
memory. See, these six banks go to this
one and these six banks are wired into this one. And that means a lot of
latency for compute tasks that require
the same data sets. This latency is a
necessary evil in the design of multiprocessor systems because of the
need for nonuniform memory access or
NUMA for short that allows these two
processors to efficiently share resources or as efficiently as they can.
So the short version of this is that it works by transparently allocating
devices and memory to each CPU which means they can more easily avoid
interrupting each other while accessing those resources. This in turn reduces
the amount of waiting around that they have to do for those resources to become
available. So that's what we're seeing during our testing like in Yunchruncher
for example where both CPUs are working
on the same data but it's not really the
intended use case for this kind of thing. What if we could use different
data sets? Then we should be able to find this kind of setups true calling.
And how better to do that than to effectively turn this system into two
independent computing machines using virtualization. So let's fire up on
which uses Red Hat KVM as a hypervisor
to see what kind of results we get splitting these resources into multiple
independent machines. Immediately, we
see worse results from our VMs than our
original 56 core testing.
But look closer at how much lower it is.
It's not a whole lot. In every test,
it's basically the same story here. And we are still way out ahead of the Core
i9 Extreme Edition, particularly when it comes to Blender. Now if we consider the
fact that we are getting simultaneous
work done that gives us a good look at
what an optimized workload might look like. I mean or heck uh virtualization
itself is a legitimate task too. I mean
this thing could be so many gamers in
one PC. But I digress. I mean, nobody is going
to buy something like this for their personal rig anytime soon, given the
$10,000 per CPU price tag, which puts it
squarely in the territory of big the
size of the check doesn't matter business. What they care about is
density. The more processing power a
single computer can manage, the more processing power that can be physically
fit into a building. And this is perhaps most important for data centers and
render farms in particular. The less those guys have to spend on setting up
the electricity and cooling management
for a data center versus the amount of
performance they can get, the better.
So, will multiple sockets make a comeback in
the proumer space? Outside of, you know, oil and gas
exploration where there are still workloads that can benefit from this
kind of thing, the chances look pretty slim if you ask me. But I don't
necessarily think that it's Intel's intent to sell these chips in the
proumer space. And for that matter, even
in the enterprise space, I don't think they move a ton of them. For me, I look
at a product like this as more of like a a future crafting exercise where it is
available today, but it's more of a representation of what actually might be
attainable a generation or two from now,
just like the 22 core processors that we were playing around with a couple of
years ago. Nowadays, those are much more
affordable and businesses are using them to power your cloud computing services.
So, thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But
if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link
to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also, linked down
there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community
forum, which you should totally join. Now I'm off to finally put this to use
for the reason that I obtained it.
Many video editors, one CPU.