Stefan Mileschin

Chew more power than Cascade Lake

Intel’s latest Ice Lake Xeons are likely to be a huge disappointment to data centre customers as they suck up more power than the previous Cascade Lake generation.

Uptime Institute research director Daniel Bizo told Data Centre Dynamics that Ice Lake SP Xeons pack a much bigger punch than the previous generation, with up to 40 enhanced processor cores on a single chip (28 in the previous generation, Cascade Lake), and deliver a 30 percent to 50 percent performance uplift across a wide range of workloads — even more for vector operations, making them attractive for high-performance computing.

However, while these processors are great for workload consolidation and demanding business applications, such as transaction processing and analytics, they were delivered late and come with no energy-efficiency benefit.

“In fact, the industry-standard server power efficiency benchmark SPECpower (established by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) shows significant regression in efficiency compared with the previous generation. Some of this is due to recent code changes in the Java engine the benchmark uses, but even when this is factored in, the change in efficiency (or rather the lack thereof) does not paint a favourable view”, Bizo wrote.

https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardwar...ons-disappoint