Six cores on their way

[gizmo71]

Been playing around with a i3-based box (mostly built out of bits I had lying around spare) with a view to replacing my aging Core 2 E5300-based server with something that can run several virtual machines. It's not been going very well though; works okay if it just sits there but as soon as I started any Hyper-V machines inside it it starts to get confused and eventually ends up with corrupted data.

So I've taken the plunge back into the AMD world and ordered an Athlon X6 1055T; hopefully being a bit more pro-oriented it'll cope better with the large memory loading I'm going to be asking it to take (a Small Business Server 12GB VM, a Windows 7 download sandbox VM and a Server 2008 file server VM, plus the host itself of course) than the i3 box.

Not really sure how far to get my hopes up - it's been about 6 years since I ran anything not made by Intel!

[Gary]

I have a i7 2600s in one of my iMacs and thats four cores with hyper threading and turbo boost taking it from 2.8 to 3.4Ghz when not using all four cores, think something like that anyway, and still so many programs don't use all four cores let, alone 6.

[pctech]

Not quite so cheap (and I'll admit don't know that much about AMD's offerings) but personally for servers I'd always go for a Xeon.

[gizmo71]

so many programs don't use all four cores let, alone 6.

Which is why none of my "normal" machines have more than two cores with hyperthreading, but since I'm going to be running at least three virtual machines (one of which will eventually be running Exchange 2010) plus the host operating system I think it's worth it.

Not quite so cheap (and I'll admit don't know that much about AMD's offerings) but personally for servers I'd always go for a Xeon.

Massively more expensive though. I'm paying under £200 for mobo and CPU - the cheapest 6-core Xeon I could see was over £750! (Most of the cost is for the extra L1/L2/L3 cache, plus the 'plumbing' for running in a multi-processor board.)

Given that my old (SBS 2008, with Exchange 2007) has run happily if a little slowly on an E5300 with just 4GB for the past few years I don't want to go nuts - I'll reserve that for my next iRacing rig - Xeon E3-1290 anyone?

[pctech]

I will say though that my personal experience of VMs running on core 2s isn't that great.

Set up a test system at work using Virtual PC with Windows Server 2003 on one VM and Vista on the other running on top of Windows Server 2003 with 2 GB of RAM and it was sluggish to say the least. (trying to recreate the environment at a training centre we'd been to for Vista training so colleagues could practice but even there it ran quite slow)

They wanted to put Vista and XP in a VM environment on our normal test systems and I successfully argued that it was not representative of a customer's system at home and the sluggishness would slow down problem investigation so we ended up with dual boot config instead.

[gizmo71]

I will say though that my personal experience of VMs running on core 2s isn't that great.

Mine's non-existent, as my server (E5200 - not an E5300 as stated above) just missed out on the hardware virtualisation supported needed for Hyper-V (the E5300 got it). Plus the mobo never supported more than 4GB, and the requirements for SBS 2011 have gone up to 8GB absolute minimum, so I have to move hardware whatever I do, and it makes sense to virtualise it and make disaster recovery a much simpler process than a bare metal restore is (I have successfully restored SBS 2008 to different hardware, but it's not a pretty process!).

SBS's biggest problem is that by default it throws everything onto the same host with Exchange - and of course Exchange loves to eat memory. Going virtual will give me much better control over that by allowing me to move SharePoint, file server, WSUS and so on off onto boxes not shared with Exchange without having to have multiple physical servers.

It's very much a voyage of discovery for me, one that I was enjoying until the i3's corruption problems stalled it.

[Technical Ben]

I have a i7 2600s in one of my iMacs and thats four cores with hyper threading and turbo boost taking it from 2.8 to 3.4Ghz when not using all four cores, think something like that anyway, and still so many programs don't use all four cores let, alone 6.

I got an AMD Phenny II x3 2.8GHZ and run it similarly. It has "cool and quiet" instead of turbo boost. So instead of overclocking when using a single core, it underclocks when not using all 2.8GHZ (if that makes any sense ). This saves power, as you only get full speed when it's needed. I wonder if I can set it up to do what the i7 does? I see the point. With single thread tasks, you want higher clocks, with multi thread tasks, you want more cores, but this increases heat, so you underclock it. With my AMD chip, I find most multithread tasks need the extra speed too, like raytracting or video encoding. So no point in underclocking the cores. I get good temps, so no worry.

Currently, I have it unlocked at 4 cores, and 3.2ghz. It runs at .8ghz when web browsing, so theoretically, I should not get too much extra power consumption (or cost!) over the long run.
I can clock individual cores, but only manually currently, not automatically. I think I can install AMD "overdrive" software, and do the same. Will check it out! [edit. I can! Using profiles. As long as the driver detects the program has loaded, I can overclock 1 core, and underclock the others. Brilliant!]

Hopefully the AMD x6 chips are good at virtual machines. I've not used an I7 so I cannot compare. Toms Hardware probably has some really good charts to compare on! (perhaps you can ask them?) For budget, AMD are great, but theoretically Intel overclock more. Intel have a higher performance (12 threads with HT enabled) and even the i5 can outperform an AMD x6. So check it first. I have no idea what the price points are though, so AMD might still be a bargain, or might not.

[gizmo71]

I got an AMD Phenny II x3 2.8GHZ and run it similarly. It has "cool and quiet" instead of turbo boost. So instead of overclocking when using a single core, it underclocks when not using all 2.8GHZ (if that makes any sense ). This saves power, as you only get full speed when it's needed.

The Intel chips all do that too. My i3 box only draws 40W total from the wall when quiesced; that's about the same as my Core 2 box does but with 500MHz more oomph and hyperthreading. Of course they both run very high efficiency power supplies and laptop hard drives - I've always compromised my servers' performance to keep power consumption down as obviously electricity isn't cheap these days.

I've also got some stuff for my GigaByte mobos that reduces the chipset speeds when the load is light, which saves a couple of watts more.

[Technical Ben]

Cool.
I cannot get the individual profiles working for the Overdive software. Mainly because it's all greek. Absolutely no explanation other than "pressing this button does [buzzword]". Even then, it sometimes works, sometimes defaults back and sometimes crashes. :/
Bit of a pity really, as it looks like a really detailed and powerful tool.

[esh]

I have an old 2GHz dual-core running as a combined dhcp/router/file-server/web-server here with VMWare virtual machines with a mere 2GB of RAM and it's perfectly fine, though admittedly it's Linux.

The other linux box is a dual-socket quad core (8 logical CPUs) and that has been great for some things. I'll have to try it on Windows sometime. I have also been Intel for a long time. My last AMD was the dual core in the server I mentioned up there, one of the X2 EE offerings.

[pctech]

Linux does definitely perform better than Windows on a Pentium D with 2 GB (my current system)

[gizmo71]

My last dual CPU was an Athlon 1900+ MP. Any old iron, any old iron, any any any old iron. Still got it up in the loft though I doubt it'd run with enough memory to do Windows 7. Outside of full on rack servers, the multi-core CPUs are soooo much more power efficient it's amazing really to see how much more oomph a simple dual core Pentium now has compared to that box, and using less electricity and way, way quieter (IIRC the CPU fans on that thing would probably have been enough to lift a small helicoper ).

X6 arrived first thing this morning, but the mobo didn't arrive until this afternoon as they'd put it on the wrong truck. Good effort to actually deliver it on a Saturday in those circumstances I guess!

Just bolted all the bits in - had completely slipped under my radar that I'd been a discrete graphics card, but in amongst my vast hoard of old carp there was an Orchid Kelvin 64 PCI so that'll do just fine. Just starting a Windows Server install - normally takes under an hour to get it up and running. Looks like it's using about 55W at idle which is pretty darned good considering it's got three times the horsepower of the i3!

[gizmo71]

Well, it's all built and installed; Server 2008 R2 as host, one 2008R2 VM and one Windows 7. That was enough to make the i3 box unstable, so if it survives a week like that without any errors I'll be happy.

Looks like it's chewing up about 70W at the wall which really isn't bad considering just how much grunt it's got. Might need to find a quieter CPU fan for it though.

Only worrying thing so far is that there appears to be a problem with one of my SATA drive bays. Luckily I have a load spare so that one's going in the bin rather than worrying about what might be wrong with it.

[esh]

I'm using some enormous 160mm tall silverstone finned heatsinks on my workstation, with 120mm Noctua fans attached (they are really very quiet, £10 a shot, but worth it).

[Technical Ben]

LOL. Your using one of these on an X6?




As for the cooler. I just got an old model Zalman. Big round thing it is. Massive thing, but cool and quiet. Not sure what their new square coolers perform like.

[gizmo71]

LOL. Your using one of these on an X6?

Yep. I do virtually everything with the box remotely (it will eventually get moved under the stairs where the current server lives), only need a card at all to do the initial install and any future troubleshooting. It has actually got an RS232 port on the back so in theory it could run fully headless, but the last time I tried to measure the power consumption of that card I failed - it was less than one watt!

As for the cooler. I just got an old model Zalman. Big round thing it is. Massive thing, but cool and quiet. Not sure what their new square coolers perform like.

My games box has one of these big Noctua puppies. The stock Intel coolers are pretty quiet - the AMD ones seem a bit old fashioned by comparison.

[esh]

Looks very similar to what I have gizmo. Noctua didn't make that all in one solution back in mid-2008 when I built it up, so I used the Silverstone heatsinks combined with Noctua fans instead. It's a great design either way, cool and very quiet.

[Technical Ben]

I'd also agree the difference between my AMD1800+ cooler (10 years old?) and the X3 coolers are probably size only. Any design changes are less than minimal to say the least.

It did have a digital speed controller though. The Zalman does not. The newer Zalmans might do. 

[gizmo71]

I'm gobsmacked. This thing is mega (or will be if it survives a week of soak testing) - now that all the Windows updates have stopped gushing into the new installs it's showing 44 watts at the wall at idle.

[Technical Ben]

I'd hate to know what my 550 watt psu pulls

[esh]

Intel had a prototype 80-core at one time. Anyone know what happened to that? Maybe it was a research dead end.

[gizmo71]

Intel had a prototype 80-core at one time. Anyone know what happened to that? Maybe it was a research dead end.

Ah, the old Polaris.

These days we call them graphics cards. For example, the GTX 590 has 1024 cores.

[pctech]

Am really surprised that Polaris was never actually released as a commercial product by Intel.

I'll bet faceook and google would have bought them by the lorry load.

[Rik]

Wouldn't they have been delivered by rocket? 

[pctech]