Intel Xeon Processor E5 v4 Family Debut: Dual E5-2697 v4 With 72 Threads Tested

Cinebench R15 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. Cinebench is very demanding of processor resources and is an excellent gauge of computational throughput.

Cinebench R15 3D Rendering

This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

We've included a single-core result here to show any generational improvements between Haswell and Broadwell. And although the Xeons are clocked lower, they still managed a higher single-threaded score. It is in the multi-threaded test, however, where the 2P Xeon E5 v4 setup really shines and outruns the desktop chip by almost 3.4x.

POV-Ray Performance Ray Tracing

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'all-CPU' benchmark option on our test machines, and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

Although we specified the use of 72 threads in POV-Ray, the benchmark never fully utilized more than 36 cores, hence the similar results for both Xeon tests. Even with only half of the compute resources being used though, the 2P Xeon E5 v4 system significantly outpaced the 5960X.

STARS Euler3d Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz. 

Though this benchmark can leverage many processor cores, it is also affected by other platform limitations like memory bandwidth. The 2P Xeon E5 v4 server offers much more memory bandwidth and significantly more compute resources and virtually doubles the speed of the 5960X.