
Although I generally don’t use the Cinebench OpenGL-based graphics test, it’s nice that the benchmark’s CPU component is able to utilize up to 64 threads.
The roughly 2000-object scene with somewhere around 300 000 polygons renders very quickly on a pair of Xeon E5-2687W processors, which execute 32 threads concurrently. The Xeon X5680s are quite a ways behind. A single Core i7-3960X almost manages to catch the two Xeon W5580s—a testament to its higher clock rates and more efficient Sandy Bridge architecture.
CPU Utilization during SolidWorks

Our SolidWorks PhotoView 360 workload caught me off guard. This render fully taxed each configuration we threw at it, regardless of core count or memory. And while the Xeon E5s finish first, their improvement over two Xeon X5680s is almost negligible.
The Xeon W5580s trail a ways back, and are actually beaten by a single Core i7-3960X. Based on past reviews, we know SolidWorks responds well to overclocking, but that’s simply not in the cards for these CPUs.
CPU Utilization during 3ds Max

Autodesk’s 3ds Max also taxes available compute resources. However, it demonstrates significant gains shifting from Xeon 5500 to 5600 and finally to E5, as we might expect. The Core i7-3960X almost manages to catch the two Xeon 5500s—again, a testament to the per-clock advantages of Sandy Bridge compared to the Nehalem architecture.

Although iray really delivers the best performance when it’s able to exploit GPU resources, our benchmark is limited to CPU-based rendering. Here, scaling is nothing short of amazing. A single Core i7-3960 at 3.3 GHz gets the job done in just over 10 minutes. Meanwhile, two eight-core Xeon E5-2687Ws at 3.1 GHz finish in about four and a half minutes. The 5600s and 5500s are in-between.
CPU Utilization during Blender

Introduced in Blender 2.61, the cycles render engine is ray tracing-based with support for interactive rendering, a new shading node system, new texture workflow, and of course GPU acceleration. Our cycles-based test sticks to processor-based rendering for now, and will evolve moving forward to include OpenCL testing.
Unfortunately, although they’re consistent, the results from the cycles engine aren’t very easy to break down. CPU utilization is always much higher using the new renderer compared to the old tile-based one, and yet the Xeon 5600s manage to outmaneuver the Xeon E5s. Core i7-3960X bests two Xeon 5500s, but again, it’s not clear why.

Our older Blender rendering test, configured to use the default 4x4 tile setting, tended to leave cores underutilized as it finished (you can see this by watching Windows’ task manager—busy time drops off very gradually). Reader Greg Wereszko let us know that we could potentially get significant gains by breaking the scene up more granularly using more tiles, keeping processor cores active as the test winds down. A 10x10 setting does, in fact, yield measurable improvements, though utilization never hits 100%, even at the start of the test when all cores should be active.

Vue is used to create, animate, and render 3D environments. Our custom scene fully taxes even the 32-thread dual Xeon E5 configuration.
As a result, performance improves significantly as you move from the 12-thread Core i7, to the 16-thread Xeon 5500s, to the 24-thread 5600s, and finally the new Xeons.
Because this workload takes a while, and yields a consistent 100% utilization, we’re using Vue 8 for our power analysis, too.
- 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 ;-)