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 Web Tests
One of the issues when running web-based tests is the nature of modern browsers to automatically install updates. This means any sustained period of benchmarking will invariably fall foul of the 'it's updated beyond the state of comparison' rule, especially when browsers will update if you give them half a second to think about it. Despite this, we were able to find a series of commands to create an un-updatable version of Chrome 56 for our 2017 test suite. While this means we might not be on the bleeding edge of the latest browser, it makes the scores between CPUs comparable.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
*Due to some issues in our web testing, only the following tests had scores that were comparable.
Google Octane 2.0: link
Along with Mozilla, as Google is a major browser developer, having peak JS performance is typically a critical asset when comparing against the other OS developers. In the same way that SunSpider is a very early JS benchmark, and Kraken is a bit newer, Octane aims to be more relevant to real workloads, especially in power constrained devices such as smartphones and tablets.
WebXPRT 2015: link
While the previous three benchmarks do calculations in the background and represent a score, WebXPRT is designed to be a better interpretation of visual workloads that a professional user might have, such as browser based applications, graphing, image editing, sort/analysis, scientific analysis and financial tools.
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.