Xeon E5-46xx processors available for preorder

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sotech

Member
Jul 13, 2011
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Australia
One retailer in AU has them, anyway; the models available are:

E5-4603 (2.0, 4C/8T, 95W)
E5-4607 (2.2, 6C/12T, 95W)
E5-4610 (2.4, 6C/12T, 2.9T, 95W)
E5-4620 (2.2, 8C/16T, 2.6T, 95W)
E5-4640 (2.4, 8C/16T, 2.8T, 95W)
E5-4650 (2.7, 8C/16T, 3.3T, 130W)
E5-4650L (2.6, 8C/16T, 3.1T, 115W)

Can't wait to see some benchmarks from a quad-4650 setup.. that would be earth-moving.

Current stockist
 

cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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To bad these wont be anywhere near the AMD 4p prices we have today. A 4p intel would be a great folding box.
 

dba

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Feb 20, 2012
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San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
Let's see... What about a new system with four Xeons E5-4640s. Performance is say 2X that of four AMD 6172s but the Xeons are $11,000K while the AMDs are $1,600 on eBay. As much as I would like PCIe3, I think I'm going to stick with AMD for now. Perhaps my next server will just be cluster of multiple copies of my existing server.

One retailer in AU has them, anyway; the models available are:

E5-4603 (2.0, 4C/8T, 95W)
E5-4607 (2.2, 6C/12T, 95W)
E5-4610 (2.4, 6C/12T, 2.9T, 95W)
E5-4620 (2.2, 8C/16T, 2.6T, 95W)
E5-4640 (2.4, 8C/16T, 2.8T, 95W)
E5-4650 (2.7, 8C/16T, 3.3T, 130W)
E5-4650L (2.6, 8C/16T, 3.1T, 115W)

Can't wait to see some benchmarks from a quad-4650 setup.. that would be earth-moving.

Current stockist
 

sotech

Member
Jul 13, 2011
305
1
18
Australia
Let's see... What about a new system with four Xeons E5-4640s. Performance is say 2X that of four AMD 6172s but the Xeons are $11,000K while the AMDs are $1,600 on eBay. As much as I would like PCIe3, I think I'm going to stick with AMD for now. Perhaps my next server will just be cluster of multiple copies of my existing server.
Yeah... that's a fairly scary price differential there. I get the feeling Intel don't feel they have much competition, thus no need for being kind with their pricing...
 

Patrick

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Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Yeah... that's a fairly scary price differential there. I get the feeling Intel don't feel they have much competition, thus no need for being kind with their pricing...
The big issue is that dual Xeon E5-2600 boxes are about as fast as some of the 4P AMD boxes. Once you figure a lot of licensing is per-core or per-socket, having two sockets with the same or fewer (faster) cores ends up making the Intel hardware premiums look small in total cost terms.

The "cluster" idea is actually one that is putting pressure on these guys and in the enterprise storage market. High-density ARM machines are going to be really interesting in some applications. One of the most interesting fall-outs from that becomes if ARM gets a lot of server support, how long until we have Raspberry Pi boards to use as dedicated home servers. Right now those things still are 3+ month lead times.
 

dba

Moderator
Feb 20, 2012
1,477
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San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
In the database benchmarks that I have seen, E5s are significantly faster, but not 2x. The Anandtech dual-CPU SQLServer2008 "high load" test compared the E5-2660 and 2690 to the AMD 6174 and found them 22% and 48% faster respectively. There were other non-database benchmarks that did show 2X as you stated, but I'm focused on the database - as are most business applications.

Even so, you make a very good point Patrick. In medium or large corporations running commercial software with per-processor licensing it does make sense to buy the fastest possible CPU. Twice the price for 10% faster is sometimes the right financial decision. A license of Oracle Business Intelligence is $295,000 per processor for example. The Oracle database is $47K per processor. Actual prices are dramatically lower after discounting, of course, but still dwarf CPU pricing.

That said, only a fraction of the servers used in a corporation are dedicated machines running per-processor licensed software these days. Open source software now handles much of the load, virtualization makes simplistic license counting more difficult, scale-out architectures mean more but smaller servers (as you point out) - as does the focus on power consumption, and alternative license models are more common than per-processor. And of course there is the fact that IT architecture innovation often begins at small, cash-poor startups and then migrates to corporations - today's startup cost-avoidance strategy become tomorrow's corporate "best practice". All of this should be an opportunity for AMD, but they will probably manage to screw it up somehow and lose even more server market share.

Apologies for veering off topic. Perhaps I'm trying to make myself feel better about not being able to justify a 4S E5 machine.

The big issue is that dual Xeon E5-2600 boxes are about as fast as some of the 4P AMD boxes. Once you figure a lot of licensing is per-core or per-socket, having two sockets with the same or fewer (faster) cores ends up making the Intel hardware premiums look small in total cost terms.

The "cluster" idea is actually one that is putting pressure on these guys and in the enterprise storage market. High-density ARM machines are going to be really interesting in some applications. One of the most interesting fall-outs from that becomes if ARM gets a lot of server support, how long until we have Raspberry Pi boards to use as dedicated home servers. Right now those things still are 3+ month lead times.
 
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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Totally correct on the AMD v. Intel issue. The Opteron 3200 series I wanted to do a piece on but AMD has a very limited lineup and vendor support is very limited at this point.

On the AT benches, I have been following them quite a bit and you are right on like for like. I was thinking more like 4x lower-end Opteron chips v. higher end Xeons and trying to match 36 month power consumption deltas + initial cost to purchase. My big thing is that I think AT is trying really hard to find use cases where AMD works best. Would love to get DB benchmarks for STH though.