Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on August 16, 2014 12:43 pm wrote:
> That's already the same or worse SPECint_2006/W then many Intel's year old Xeon E3L processors:
> E3-1285L v3: SPECint_2006=210, 65 W
> E3-1265L v3: SPECint_2006=194, 45 W
> E3-1230L v3: SPECint_2006=168, 25 W
>
> So, Cavium has to execute perfectly just to come close to *old* Xeon E3s!

Not only that but with all these rate scores been thrown around it seems that nobody is paying attention to the single-threaded performance these cores will offer. One of the huge upsides of the low-power E3s is that they can pretty much all turbo to within 70-80% of the top frequency of the highest, most expensive bins. That means you get up to 70-80% of the single-threaded performance of the state-of-the-art as far as single-threaded performance goes. So how fast are these ARM cores going to be when running a single thread? I think that's a very important question because while it's true that low-power Xeons are bought with throughput in mind it's also true that they can still guarantee very fast response times in the face of serial code sections and that's very important in the server market IMHO.