The Intel Broadwell Xeon E3 v4 Review: 95W, 65W and 35W with eDRAM
by Ian Cutress on August 26, 2015 9:00 AM ESTOffice Performance
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
Dolphin prefers single threaded speed and IPC, which the extra frequency of the v3 wins out here. The disparity between the 65W/95W v4 processors and the 35W processor is most obvious here.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
WinRAR is our classic 'eDRAM works here!' benchmark, clearly showing how Broadwell benefits. Although, one might argue that WinRAR is not a typical workload environment. It is also poignant to show that the 95W v4 doesn't win here in this variable-threaded load.
3D Particle Movement
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
Similar to CineBench, in single threaded mode the v3 wins out due to the faster frequency, but in multithreaded mode the advancements in the Broadwell core due to better thread resource management puts at least the 95W v4 ahead.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing. For our web benchmarks, we take four well known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.
For web implementations, both Kraken and Octane see benefits moving up to Broadwell, but it is worth noting that moving to Skylake is an even better benefit. This again comes down to the management of CPU instructions between threads, and having benefits associated with keeping the knowledge of past instructions or information in lower cache levels. In would seem in this regard, if you count these benchmarks indicative of a real workload, that web-based throughput implementations are more in-flight operation limited than any other resource.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
72 Comments
View All Comments
ruthan - Thursday, August 27, 2015 - link
So pleas add some virtualization into benchmarking set.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 27, 2015 - link
It's on the cards.Mastadon - Thursday, August 27, 2015 - link
No support for DDR4 RAM? C'mon, it's 2015.SuperVeloce - Thursday, August 27, 2015 - link
This is Broadwell, not Skylake... It's meant to introduce new litography process and updated platform, not new arhitectures and memory controllers...Oxford Guy - Thursday, August 27, 2015 - link
DDR4 isn't of much benefit, except for servers (power consumption)AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, August 27, 2015 - link
Skylake FTW. Why pay more for the slower Xeon?Oxford Guy - Thursday, August 27, 2015 - link
If you read the Skylake review here you'll find that it's not really better than Broadwell, just different.AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, August 27, 2015 - link
Dude, look at the graphs on the conclusion page of this review. Skylake beats the closest Xeon by 19% in most of them.Oxford Guy - Sunday, August 30, 2015 - link
I wasn't talking about Xeon. Look at the previous desktop review. I read your post too quickly and missed that you were talking about Xeon.joex4444 - Thursday, August 27, 2015 - link
Is it even clear that the 1285 and 1285L performed differently to a statistically significant degree? I mean if one has a benchmark performed three times and scores of, say, {1176, 1188, 1182} are obtained for the 1285 but the 1285L gets {1190, 1175, 1184} then the 1285L seems to have an average of 1183 while the 1285 has an average of 1182. But when we look at those distributions, they completely agree and show no performance difference, which given one has an extra 100MHz on it we'd expect a 1 part in 34 advantage, ie, a 2.9% performance gap with the 95W 1285 outperforming the 65W 1285L.Further, it's important to recall the first chart showing that the 95W 1285 actually used less power in the idle -> OCCT test. The TDP is not a measure of how much power the CPU uses, plain and simple. It's a specification stating the maximum amount of power that can be dissipated in the form of heat. Therefore when the author states "100MHz does not adequately explain 30W in the grand scheme of things" they're exactly correct about the TDP, but it comes off suggesting one actually *uses* 30W more than the other which is simply not true. It does sound pretty clear that either (a) Intel bins their TDPs and the 3.5GHz one bumped up past the 65W bin or (b) Intel uses better parts for the 1285L, but this does not explain why it would cost $100-ish (~18%) less as we would expect better parts to be scarcer not more abundant.
As far as binned TDPs go, we know they do this. Look at the 84W parts. They don't all use 84W, they're just all rated as capable of dissipating up to 84W. Further we don't see arbitrary TDPs, we see a few, eg, 35W, 65W, 84W, 95W, 125W, and if you're AMD, 220W.