juanrga (nospam.delete@this.juanrga.com) on August 17, 2014 4:59 pm wrote:
> David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on August 17, 2014 10:23 am wrote:
>
> > > And about total power consumption and efficiency:
> > >
> > >

Compared with Xeon, ThunderX could deliver 50% to 100%
> > > more performance per watt and per dollar, particularly
> > > when considering the additional chips that Intel needs to complete the server design.

> > >
> > > Therein they are mentioning the advantage of SoC vs a CPU. As I said before, the 80W are for
> > > the whole SoC. The 95W are only for Xeon CPU, adds the TDP of rest of components to the
> > > Intel platform and you will need up to double power to do the same work than ARM SoC.
> >
> > Your calculations are wrong, but your point is good.
> >
> > Intel does not (currently) integrate networking, and that leaves an opportunity for a competitor to offer a
> > different system architecture that is differentiated. That
> > being said, it only costs about 10-20W to add 4x10G
> > ethernet MACs. I'm not sure about the actual $ cost, but Intel would simply need to lower their prices.
> >
>
> Add the south Bridge and now consider the performance gap, 350 vs 320, and you will obtain that you
> will need something close to twice more power to do the same work than the ARM SoC. I got 89%.

Let's compare calculations here.

I've got:

ThunderX: 80W @ 350 SPECint_rate
Xeon E5-2650L: 159W @ 546 SPECint_rate, including 2x70W CPUs + IOH + 7W for a dual 40G ethernet controller, note that you can fit upto 5 NICs for each server CPU.

However, Thunder will probably be compared against HSW-EP or BDW-EP, which should be about 30-50% better performance/watt than IVB-EP.

David