8-Core Intel Xeon 'V8" Sneak Peek - Dual Quads
Back in January at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Intel was showing off a rig in their booth dubbed the "V8". It was essentially a dual-socket workstation platform outfitted with a pair of quad-core Xeon processors for a total of eight cores - hence the 'V8'. In their demo, Intel ran the CPU benchmark built into 3DMark06 and as was evident in the signage over the rig, proudly boasted that it was capable of a CPU score of 6,089 points. Today we've actually got the parts in house to assemble a similar rig, but ours is configured with considerably more powerful hardware...
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What you're looking at here is one of Intel's workstation-class S5000XVN dual-socket motherboards, coupled to a pair of Xeon X5365 processors, 4GB of Samsung DDR2-667 FBDIMMs, and a GeForce 8800 GTX. The motherboard is based on Intel's 5000X chipset and the processors are clocked at 3.0GHz a piece, riding on a 1.33GHz front side bus. We did some preliminary testing on this rig and wanted to share some of the juicy details with you before our full article is complete. These tests were run on Windows XP Professional SP2, with the latest Intel chipset and NVIDIA Forceware graphics drivers installed.
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SiSoft SANDRA XI SP1 - CPU, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth Benchmarks
Quad-Core Intel Xeon X5365 x 2, 4GB FBDIMM 667, GeForce 8800 GTX
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If you flip through the SiSoft SANDRA screenshots above you see just how much raw horsepower is lurking under this rig's hood. The Processor Arithmetic and Multimedia benchmark scores are more than double those of a Core 2 Duo QX6800. And the Memory Bandwidth benchmark reported maximum bandwidth scores in the neighborhood of 4GB/s, which is low by today's standards and about 1GB/s off the mark set by the QX6800.
We also ran a default 3DMark06 test and a multi-threaded Cinebench v9.5 benchmark on this rig and were thoroughly impressed. The overall 3Dmark06 score was 13,002 (SM2.0=5,104 / HDR & SM3.0=4,932); the CPU score was 6,556 - almost 500 points higher than the rig Intel was showing off at CES. And the rig completed the Cinebench rendering pass in only 10 seconds, which is about 4-5 seconds faster then a quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6800.
We'll be doing more extensive testing in our full evaluation, but couldn't resist putting up some of these images and benchmark scores to whet all of your appetites. A rig like this is probably outside the realm of what most enthusiasts think about when designing their own systems, but Content Creation and Multimedia Production professionals would be chomping at the bit for this puppy.
Comments
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dayum! i'm looking forward to the article! 8-) |
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OK this thing is fast, no doubt, but what's going to sepperate this from just building a dually xeon?
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Well, this is just a dually Xeon setup. It just happens to be the most cutting edge currently available.
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Follow-up question: Do you think that Intel releasing what seems to be direct competition for the Quad FX (aka Quadfather) might be a sign that the era of multi-core on the desktop is really starting to kick in? Is multiple sockets for high-end a trend you see going forward or is this just a short-term arrangement? Of course your logic would be good to have too, but if you can't share due to info embargoes or something... |
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I wouldn't call this setup a direct competitor to QuadFX, but Intel is obviously trying to get the point across that if you want a dual-socket Core-microarchitecture powered system, the options are already available. If they come up with an enthusiast class board, with multi-GPU and overclocking support, that doesn't require special memory or Xeon processors, then I'd say they're reacting to Quad-FX. For now though, consider this a show of force.
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In the future, do not link to images using a weird script, it prevents people from middle clicking to open the images in new tabs. Thanks!
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We'll see what we can do and I deleted all that wonderful html you dropped in there. |
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I am having a MacPro modified to run Vista. So far the testing suggests no problem with installing Vista and eliminating the Mac OS entirely.
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Who's we? Care to share your results with us here? We can publish them for you in an article if you like. Contact me directly: davea@hothardware.com
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I have a system engineer responsible for all our computer, server and network systems at the company I own.
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Sounds good! Keep us in the look please!
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Hello, yes great stuff ... looking into it for my own company, yet:
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You're correct in your observations for sure Alberdell. FBDIMM memory at DDR667 speeds are definitely going to fall short, especially when you consider latency settings are currently running around CAS 5 for these modules. FBDIMM DDR800 should be coming soon with lower latencies but currently it is definitely the achilles heel of the platform. However, the processor cores and the larger on-chip caches of Intel Xeons quad-cores help compensate in overall performance a lot. |
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i have much better memory bandwidth result with my 2*quad 5355, supermicro x7da3 and 8* 2gb kingston ddr2 667. I had replaced intel 5000xvn mainboard with supermicro x7da3 because blackmagic decklink refused to work. In my opinion Supermicro is the best for quad xeon.
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