
The theoretical gains moving from two prior-generation Xeon 5600s to a pair of Xeon E5s is impressive, just as the shift from Xeon 5500 to Xeon 5600 was.
A single Core i7-3960X does extremely well compared to a pair of Xeon W5580s. However, the Xeon E5-2687Ws, based on the same Sandy Bridge architecture, benefit from an additional two cores each.

Sandra 2011’s multimedia suite similarly shows the Xeon E5s dominating. We even turned AVX instructions off to make the results more comparable. Applications optimized for the x86 extensions enjoy even greater throughput.
I didn’t bother running standalone AVX numbers this time around because the core architecture we’re dealing with here is identical to the desktop implementation. If you’d like a comparison of Intel’s AVX implementation compared to AMD’s, check out this page in AMD Bulldozer Review: FX-8150 Gets Tested, where Cakewalk’s CTO Noel Borthwick gave us access to AVX-optimized routines from Sonar X1 for testing.

Three of the CPUs in this test should support AES-NI. As I discovered when I wrote Intel Xeon 5600-Series: Can Your PC Use 24 Processors?, the company’s Xeon 5600 engineering samples didn’t yet support the feature, though. As a result, only the Core i7-3960X and Xeon E5s reflect acceleration.
Why the huge performance gap? Well, we have two processors cranking on cryptography versus one, for starters. What might you expect to see from a pair of retail Xeon 5600s in the same test? Lower performance than the E5s, almost certainly. A hardware-based feature like AES-NI is incredibly easy to execute, and we know from tests that I ran in Intel Core i7-3960X Review: Sandy Bridge-E And X79 Express that memory bandwidth is actually the bottleneck in measures of AES256 performance. Thus, a quad-channel memory controller with support for DDR3-1600 has an inherent advantage over a triple-channel controller limited to DDR3-1333.

And here’s a perfect illustration. Although registered DDR3-1600 modules are hard to come by, as mentioned on the previous page, Crucial sent over 64 GB (8 x 8 GB) of PC-12800 memory for our E5-based workstation, enabling close to two times the effective bandwidth on Xeon E5 compared to the Xeon 5600s.
Interestingly, the Core i7-3960X, armed with unbuffered DDR3-1600 is the second-place finisher, even though its four memory channels are theoretically less capable than a pair of triple-channel Xeons armed with DDR3-1333.

After back and forth emails with Adrian Silasi over SiSoftware, we couldn’t figure out why the cache performance results for the Xeon 5600-series processors were turning out so low (particularly L2 cache bandwidth, which we'd expect to be far higher). One suspicion is that this routine is tripping a throttle due to repeated use of the cache and rapidly-escalating temperatures, though Intel's engineers claim the Xeon 5500s and 5600s don't have this mechanism in place.
It’s clear, however, that the Sandy Bridge-E and Sandy Bridge-EP architectures make big improvements to L3 cache throughput by virtue of their ring buses.
- Xeon E5-2687W: Replacing The Best With Something Better
- Meet The Xeon E5s
- Intel C600 Chipset Family
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
- Benchmark Results: Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5
- Benchmark Results: Media/Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Rendering
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Percent Faster: Xeon E5s Vs. Xeon 5600s
- Power Consumption And Efficiency
- Xeon E5: Respectable Performance Boost, Bigger Efficiency Gain
I'd be really surprised to see these in gaming machines, even in the high end boutiques. That's a $2k processor they reviewed, and basically all it offers over the $1k SB-E chip (for gamers) is an extra pair of cores, which games can't make use of.
Anandtech benched those next to the new Xeons. Went about as well as Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/6
Mentioned on the test page--I've invited them to send hardware and they haven't moved on it yet.
Great article! I was not expecting my mind to be blown away today, and it was
I'd be really surprised to see these in gaming machines, even in the high end boutiques. That's a $2k processor they reviewed, and basically all it offers over the $1k SB-E chip (for gamers) is an extra pair of cores, which games can't make use of.
Anandtech benched those next to the new Xeons. Went about as well as Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/6
Mentioned on the test page--I've invited them to send hardware and they haven't moved on it yet.
I would guess that's because Interlagos is garbage compared to the new Xeons and they know it. I don't think they're terribly eager for the front page of Tom's Hardware to show the low end Xeon's beating the best Interlagos has to offer.
Sorry, vote me down all you like, but the title was just silly.
Not really my place to speculate--only to point out that I similarly wanted to see AMD hardware included and explain why it isn't there
No, the title is a fairly common phrase in American English.
"Now that I've got X, I can really do some damage" would probably be the way I hear it used most often.
Yeah, I understand that you're in a sensitive position. But being a lowly commenter, I'm free to speculate all I want!
Muahahahaha!
Precisely ;-)
In my opinion, the SolidWorks test is also one of those not representative of typical SolidWorks tasks. PhotoView only renders realistic images of a SolidWorks model. Personally, I think the Specviewperf SolidWorks test would be significantly more representative of average SolidWorks use.
Although I really hate to draw this comparison, PhotoView is more like using Power Point to organize a display of images created in Photoshop. In this comparison, most of the grunt work is done by Photoshop rather than Power Point, as is most of the grunt work done in SolidWorks then rendered in PhotoView. Performance differences revealed by the Specviewperf test are more informative, IMHO. See these.
we have to wait to long for that..
Reading this however, all I can do is think how PO'ed I am at Intel not enabling the 7th & 8th cores on the SB-E i7-3960X and i7-3930K.
I'm going to drop these into X79 and compare the numbers to see how power is affected. Maybe get a little overclocking out of them, just to check ;-)