Best CPU setup for highly-parallel work? (Prefer 20+ threads)

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Spoudazo

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What do you think? Parallel usage will be pegged at 100%, regardless of number of cores. Would like to spend less than $1500 for the CPU, though the cheaper the better.

Do you think a two-CPU mobo would be good? Looking to have at least 20+ threads available.

16 core AMD? ($719), or two of these?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113306

Intel Xeon E5-2650 v3 Haswell ($1200)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117477

Intel Core i7-5960X Haswell-E 8-Core 3.0GHz ($1050)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117404

It will be a while before I buy, (few months to a year or so possibly).

Thoughts? Anything I'm missing?

CPU needs to support SSE2, AVX, etc.
 
Unfortunately you pay for what you get. Also, AMD's CPUs are more inefficient than Intel CPUs, so if this is a long term system pegged at 100% all the time, lowered power consumption on Intel CPUs will probably more than pay for itself as compared to AMD. If this is a short term system, then it might be better to go with an AMD dual or quad CPU board.
 
What about a Xeon Phi? The Intel SC3120A Xeon Phi is $1600 for 57 cores at 1.1 GHz.
 
The Phi coprocessor can't run all, regularly x86/x64 code can it? It sounds neat, but only if it can run games too (mostly older PC games).
 
PcZac said:
What about a Xeon Phi? The Intel SC3120A Xeon Phi is $1600 for 57 cores at 1.1 GHz.
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The co-processor does not support MMX, SSEx and AVX instructions, and SSE and AVX are requirements unforuntately.
 
Answer this, is this going to be a long term system or short term?
 
"Highly Parallel" - if you wish to find truly optimal setup this has to be specified in more detail. For example how heavy are the threads with respect to required system resources? If you need SSX and AVX the obvious choice are Xeon processors with the number or cores/hyperthreads matching the number of threads. You start with single processor up to 18/36 threads and end up with two processors for your required number of threads. There could be some issues regarding the tradefoff of higher number of threads and speed, higher core processors are typically slower.
 
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This is mainly for some raytracing-related code I'm writing in my spare time. It's currently in C++, and I'll try to vectorize as much as possible for use with SSE2 or AVX.

System RAM will be probably around 16 to 32gb, as the data sets will not be necessarily too huge.
 
Xeon E5 2683 V3 sounds interesting, though in theory, wouldn't two 16-core AMD cpus be faster (i.e.-32 threads).

Don't get me wrong, I love intel CPUs.
 
That's a tough choice. Personally, I'm probably with Tsumi on this one. There is going to be a trade off. With the AMD choice you're going to be saving quite a bit of money and receiving 50% more processing power for multi-threading applications, but at the same time the difference between the Intel's chips is efficiency. Those AMD cores do not stack up nearly as well core-to-core compared to Intel's.

The kid in me says go AMD, but answer I'd probably give the boss is the Xeon.
 
Can you answer this question already?

Will this be a long term system running 100% 24/7, or a short term system where once you're done with your project, you won't be using it anymore?
 
fixedmy7970 said:
i'm not familiar with povray benchmarking and what the ratio means, but they are similar perf between the abu dhabi and the e5 in povray time,

http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2013q1/cpu2006-20121023-24837.html
http://www.specbench.org/cpu2006/results/res2014q1/cpu2006-20140224-28744.pdf
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Cool. From that report it appears the dual AMD Opteron 6376 is about 27% faster than than the dual Intel E5-2660 CPUs, and it appears to be about 38% cheaper setup (just in reference to the CPUs, i.e. two Xeons 2650 at $2300 vs two AMD Opteron 6376 at $1440.
 
Odd, is this correct?

Are there 16 actual cores, 32 with hyper-threading? or is it 16 cores with hyper-threading? Oct 25,2013
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Answer/reply
If you are doing integer calculations then then there are 16 cores, but if you are doing floating point calcuations there are only 8 cores.
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Is this correct?

So when rendering something, it'll only use 8 cores instead of 16? :confused: From the benchmarks, that doesn't seem correct.

It's in the Q/A part here,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113306
 
While probably using 25-50% more power.

Which comes back to whether or not you will be using this computer for a long time. You have to factor in long term electricity costs when it comes to systems like this.

The 6376 has 16 integer cores. It does not have hyperthreading. It has 8 256-bit FPU units, which can split into 16 128-bit FPU units, depending on what workload you have.
 
Ah. This will be my at-home machine, not work machine, so It'll be mainly used for gaming, experiments with real-time raytracing, and some rendering in Blender/Cycles.
 
If it's used for gaming, you want higher clock speed Xeons. The low clock speed of many server CPUs will be a bottleneck. And Opteron processors have about 60% per core performance at the same clock speeds as a Xeon.
 
Ok. I was looking at cases, and considering all the items needed to fit a server mobo w/ two CPUs, etc., and to save hassle and space, maybe I'll just go w/ the e5-2670.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117475
12 cores and 24 threads :)

Good point about the energy consumption and single-core speed, I guess I'll be sticking to Intel this time. :)

Any suggestions on a motherboard? :)
 
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SuperMicro for rock solid stability, or Asus for something more consumer oriented.
 
Spoudazo said:
Ok. I was looking at cases, and considering all the items needed to fit a server mobo w/ two CPUs, etc., and to save hassle and space, maybe I'll just go w/ the e5-2670. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911747512 cores and 24 threads :) Good point about the energy consumption and single-core speed, I guess I'll be sticking to Intel this time. :)
Any suggestions on a motherboard? :)
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Do you mean buying one or two Xeons (counting threads or hyperthreads)?
 
Spoudazo said:
One Xeon, 12 cores
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Then you will have 12 real threads. In many cases hyperthreading does not increase performance. But if the number of cores is lower than real threads there is 10-core 2687v3 processor which is faster 3.1 GHz.

Motherboard, every better X99 mobo supports Xeon v3 and up to 128 ECC memory.
 
wirk said:
Then you will have 12 real threads. In many cases hyperthreading does not increase performance. But if the number of cores is lower than real threads there is 10-core 2687v3 processor which is faster 3.1 GHz.

Motherboard, every better X99 mobo supports Xeon v3 and up to 128 ECC memory.
Click to expand...

Be careful when saying every X99 board supports ECC memory. You have to watch out for ECC Registered
 
wirk said:
Then you will have 12 real threads. In many cases hyperthreading does not increase performance. But if the number of cores is lower than real threads there is 10-core 2687v3 processor which is faster 3.1 GHz.

Motherboard, every better X99 mobo supports Xeon v3 and up to 128 ECC memory.
Click to expand...

In many cases it doesn't, but in many cases it does. It just depends on the workload.
 
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