The Intel Xeon W Review: W-2195, W-2155, W-2123, W-2104 and W-2102 Tested
by Ian Cutress & Joe Shields on July 30, 2018 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Xeon
- Workstation
- ECC
- Skylake-SP
- Skylake-X
- Xeon-W
- Xeon Scalable
Benchmarking Performance: CPU Rendering Tests
Rendering tests are a long-time favorite of reviewers and benchmarkers, as the code used by rendering packages is usually highly optimized to squeeze every little bit of performance out. Sometimes rendering programs end up being heavily memory dependent as well - when you have that many threads flying about with a ton of data, having low latency memory can be key to everything. Here we take a few of the usual rendering packages under Windows 10, as well as a few new interesting benchmarks.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Corona 1.3: link
Corona is a standalone package designed to assist software like 3ds Max and Maya with photorealism via ray tracing. It's simple - shoot rays, get pixels. OK, it's more complicated than that, but the benchmark renders a fixed scene six times and offers results in terms of time and rays per second. The official benchmark tables list user submitted results in terms of time, however I feel rays per second is a better metric (in general, scores where higher is better seem to be easier to explain anyway). Corona likes to pile on the threads, so the results end up being very staggered based on thread count.
Corona is very multi-threaded, so we expect most of the chips to push their legs on this one. The difference between the W-2195 and the Core i9-7980XE is much more as we expect for a fully MT test, with the W-2155 trading blows with the TR 1920X and the lower quad-core SKUs bringing up the rear.
Blender 2.78: link
For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.
Blender is a very threaded test, but not completely, as we can see with the W-2195 still trailing even the Core i9-7960X. The W-2104 is pushing against the Core i5-6600K, despite the lower frequency, due to the quad-channel memory in play.
LuxMark v3.1: Link
As a synthetic, LuxMark might come across as somewhat arbitrary as a renderer, given that it's mainly used to test GPUs, but it does offer both an OpenCL and a standard C++ mode. In this instance, aside from seeing the comparison in each coding mode for cores and IPC, we also get to see the difference in performance moving from a C++ based code-stack to an OpenCL one with a CPU as the main host.
POV-Ray 3.7.1b4
Another regular benchmark in most suites, POV-Ray is another ray-tracer but has been around for many years. It just so happens that during the run up to AMD's Ryzen launch, the code base started to get active again with developers making changes to the code and pushing out updates. Our version and benchmarking started just before that was happening, but given time we will see where the POV-Ray code ends up and adjust in due course.
Cinebench R15: link
The latest version of CineBench has also become one of those 'used everywhere' benchmarks, particularly as an indicator of single thread performance. High IPC and high frequency gives performance in ST, whereas having good scaling and many cores is where the MT test wins out.
Cinebench is a 'classic' benchmark, despite being four generations behind the Cinema4D software at this point. The W-2195 goes toe-to-toe in the multithreaded test against the TR 1950X, but easily wins against it in the single threaded test. The W-2195 also beats the i9-7980XE in ST, but loses in MT.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
74 Comments
View All Comments
Lolimaster - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
I see no point in this when TR exist, not only 1950X already crushes but the 2990X will just made them an afterthought.cm2187 - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
It says “workstation” but is there any reason not to base an entry level server on these specs? Cheaper than server chips, ample of ram, ECC, vpro. Is there anything Intel will do to enforce a segmentation?GreenReaper - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
That is almost certainly one of the purposes of the custom 4-core editions. HP's MicroServer Gen8 had a two-core 2.3Ghz Celeron with ECC support - this has significantly more wattage but I'd expect to see it in hardware with a need for long-term highly-reliable duty like communications equipment.buxe2quec - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
This may be a stupid question, but how come my E3-1220 (3.1 GHz) from 2011 has 80 W TDP and this Xeon W-2104 (first table) has 120 W?I thought that power consumption went down per MHz... this is 50% increase.
buxe2quec - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
I saw the numbers on page 2 about the real tests, but I don't have the ones for the E3-1220 to compare the actual values, so I was comparing only nominal TDP.Hamm Burger - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
I'm lucky enough to be using a 10-core iMac Pro, so have the Apple-specific W-2150B. I'm afraid I'm not about to prise it out of the system so that you can test it, but here's the result of one anecdotal test: running the CPU portion of Cinebench 15 for macOS gives a mutithreaded score of 2012 and single-threaded of 182 — a spot below your figures for the W-2195. Also, Intel Power Gadget shows the CPU drawing 150W, with the cores hitting almost 100° during the multithreaded test.abufrejoval - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
I guess Intel wants to ensure AMD Threadripper gets the home-grown workstation market going forward…Like you mention, previous generation CPUs, even high core count variants are floating around in the second hand market and I got myself an OEM variant of the E5-2699v3 (E5-2696v) about two years back for around $700 from China via eBay (“extremely affordable”). That’s an 18core chip that will clock a little higher than the 2699, 3.6GHz instead of 3.3 when fewer cores are used, while the all-core clocks and TDP (145 Watts) are the same.
I am running this in an X99 board with 128GB of ECC UDIMM (bought before the RAM prices hiked 100%) and operating it with a BCLK overclock of 103.8, which results in a clean 4GHz for low-core workloads, 3.8GHz with four cores active and 2.8GHz for all-core unless it’s AVX workloads (prime95), where it may drop to 2.6GHz, all with well below 140 Watts and generally quite cool with an unnoticeable Noctua fan inside a $60 cheapo tower.
It runs games rather well, clocking high on the few cores most game engines use and it also does well using lots of cores on things like massive compile jobs (make -j40) or machine learning tasks (helped along by GTX 1080ti where GPUs are better).
It gets 2552 on Cinebench R15, so it won’t quite beat the current generation Threadrippers or these Xeons, but at the premium prices Intel wants to charge for Xeon-W as well as current DRAM prices, I simply couldn’t afford something in this league for the home-lab.
abufrejoval - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
Here is a Geekbench result for this rig: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/9220520alpha754293 - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
The other reason why someone might consider the Xeon W (such as myself) - high memory and need a very fast single threaded performance.The consumer parts are limited to 64 GB (ECC or not) of RAM whereas the Xeon W caps out at 512 GB.
Most "normal" people might not need that, but I can tell you right now that for some of the pre and post-processing work that I do, I'm looking now at either a 256 or 512 GB system with very fast single threaded performance.
Dug - Thursday, August 2, 2018 - link
I know you've heard it before, but just want to throw in my 2 cents.Could you please try a newer version of Handbrake for H.256 benchmarks. I know when doing comparisons you need consistency and it's best to stick with one version, but x265 is becoming very popular, and the new version fixes previous x265 issues. Plus they have new Production presets which might be helpful. Thanks for any consideration.