• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Cache or Clockspeed?

TeeJayHoward

TeeJayHoward

Limpness Supreme
2FA
Joined
Feb 8, 2005
Messages
13,384
Which would you rather have?

A) A 4Ghz 4-core chip with 10MB of L3 cache, 1MB of L2 cache for $500
B) A 2Ghz 8-core chip with 20MB of L3 cache, 2MB of L2 cache for $1500

I can't seem to find anyone who's compared the E3 and E7 Xeon processors. The E3 seems to have higher clock speeds, less cache, and fewer cores. The E7 has lower clock speeds, more cache, and (sometimes) more cores. For applications like Metal Ray rendering or H.264 encoding, which would be more beneficial, the cache or the speed? Heck, how many F@H PPD would an E7 get vs an E3?

Edit: Spec.org has benchmarks for the E7-4860 @ 2.26 and the E3-1280 @ 3.5. (spoiler: The E3's MUCH faster than the E7, almost 2x on some tests) It looks to me like clock speed is king, but is that just for this benchmark?
 
Last edited:
In most cases I would still pick A since A has double the clockspeed. It will not get you equal performance to 2 cores by running 2 threads on the CPU with double the clockspeed but it should be close enough and obviously if you are running tasks that do not need close to the 16 threads ( I assume both chips have HT enabled) of CPU B then A would win.
 
The Intel® Xeon® E7-8XXX processors are very different animals then the Intel Xeon E3-1XXX processors. First of all the Intel Xeon E7-8XXX processors are designed for running up to 8 of these processors on board in a heavy server environment of well over 500 people. The Intel Xeon E3-1XXX is a single processor entry level server processor where the most it might server is around 20 people. Because of the differences in design intent the clock speed on the Intel Xeon E3-1XXX can be higher but they won’t need to support as many threads as the Intel Xeon E7-8XXX. You can see the differences between Intel Xeon E3-1280 and the Intel Xeon E7-8870 here http://ark.intel.com/Compare.aspx?ids=52278,53580,.
 
yup. The 8 socket solutions allow for those who want to build insanely thread and memory bandwidth heavy solutions.
 
Aah, I didn't notice the difference in the number of memory channels. How big a difference does that make for non-database applications? For example, suppose I operated a 3D content generation studio. I've got 10 employees who want to use 3DS Max to make an animated short. Their workstations would have the E3 chip, as there's not really a need for the extra cores, but there IS a need for the increased clock speed. Why would I pay 10 times as much for the E7 in the server room though? I could get 6 1U midrange E3 servers and cluster them together for the render farm for the cost of a single (ultra high end) E7 chip, and that's JUST the chip. I was trying to figure out why I'd want 10 cores at a low clock speed instead of 24 cores at a high clock speed. I'm sure there's some advantages in rack density, perhaps power savings, and any application that requires all components to be in a single box would definitely benefit.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top