[Beowulf] General thoughts on Xeon 56xx versus E5 series?

[Orion Poplawski]

On 09/14/2012 05:00 AM, Igor Kozin wrote:
> if memory bandwidth is your concern then there are models which boost
> it quite significantly. e.g.
> http://ark.intel.com/products/64584/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2660-20M-Cache-2_20-GHz-8_00-GTs-Intel-QPI
> probably very few codes are going to benefit from AVX without extra
> efforts but BW is a clear win.
> i'm seeing a good speed up on some applications which can be
> attributed to higher BW.

There are 6.4, 7.2, and 8 GT/s chips

This is an interesting puzzle and the mid tier price point:

DUAL INTEL XEON 6C E5-2640 (2.5GHz/7.2GT/s/15MB) CPU  [+ $1,810.00]
DUAL INTEL XEON 4C E5-2643 (3.3GHz/8GT/s/10MB) CPU  [+ $1,798.00]
DUAL INTEL XEON 8C E5-2650 (2GHz/8GT/s/20MB) CPU  [+ $2,270.00]

So for BW limited one would go with the second two, but you have a big choice 
between low cores/cache high MHz and high cores/cache low MHz.

-- 
Orion Poplawski
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