Is it a good time to buy a 16-cores Xeon workstation?

#21

yeah but turbo mode doesn’t really apply much when you’re stressing all cores;)

Anyway, I could be completely wrong. The benchmarks will all be revealed all once it’s released. I’m just saying, intel specifying the LINPACK score to measure GFLOPS is already a known benchmark in itself.

I hope it’s 45+% faster…I just have serious doubts, at least with real-world CG rendering software.

I mean put it this way - with the last xeon upgrade, sandy-bridge was a major architecture improvement (like 25%) over westmere and increased the core count 33%. It managed to get cinebench scores of 38% higher over the older top chip.

This time the core count is increasing 25% more cores and a minor architecture improvement (7%). I’m not sure how that will get a 45+% higher cinebench score over today’s top xeon.

And cinebench is generally considered to be about as linear as 3d rendering can get unlike a lot of modern scene files that utilize several single-threaded functions before multithreading kicks in.

That intel slide was released just last week, but it’s true that intel could have created it long ago. Though it does include some very specific things about the new phi’s which make me think it’s fairly recent.

About waiting:
Speaking from experience, because I’ve been in situations where money was available to buy new hardware/software and I chose to wait a few months for the new chips or software version to come out. The money will find a way to evaporate. Someone else will need it, and it will slowly get chipped away at. Also just how businesses are ran with their fiscal year and tax deductions - the business wants to recirculate the money ASAP for tax deductions. Holding onto it is too expensive in the long run.

We still don’t know if the chips really will be available to the mass market in 2 months. Probably some vendors will have them and will be updating their BIOS’s for their workstations and then just like apple has said, will ship by the end of the year. You’ll probably be able to buy the chips themselves online in a couple months, but I wouldn’t automatically assume workstation vendors are going to be shipping the new systems to your door in 2 months. Most vendors don’t do preorders for new systems before they’re ready to ship, but who knows.

#22

well Apple has a close relationship with Intel and they know the next Mac Pro is going to be in high demand, so I’m sure they will be shipping the Mac Pro it as soon as vendors can buy those chips. It’s happened in the past

and, considering they have Mari and OS X 10.9 running on the Mac Pro from the WWDC demos, it’s safe to say they have close-to-final silicon already.

#23

Look like I could reserve that budget until december. :thumbsup:

#24

if it was Haswell, I’d say buy now since there is almost no difference in performance since it’s just about power savings but Ivy Bridge Xeon is actually a noticeable upgrade for performance from Sandy Bridge Xeon

#25

From what I’ve seen, at the same clock speeds ivy bridge is around 7% faster than sandy bridge and haswell is 6-7% faster than ivy bridge - give or take

#26

And 4 more cores. For the same price. Well worth waiting 2-3 months.

#27

really? unless I remember wrong, FPU performance was the same for the latter. edit: I think I realized the problem - I was comparing different clock speeds so it’s actually faster than I thought since a 1.3GHz Haswell is the same as a 1.8GHz Ivy Bridge in Cinebench:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7113/2013-macbook-air-core-i5-4250u-vs-core-i7-4650u/2

#28

Don’t forget to account for the “turbo” since they’re the same for the single threaded Cinebench, but not the multithreaded.

#29

The only thing is that I doubt you’ll see dual-CPU machines for another few months after that due to scarcity. Nevertheless, a single-CPU Ivy Bridge Xeon machine at 2.7GHz and 12-cores will likely perform about the same as a dual 8-core Sandy Bridge Xeon at 2.4GHz and cost a lot less than the dual. For tasks that are poorly threaded (Photoshop, most video, almost anything in Maya that isn’t rendering), the newer machines will smoke the older ones.

#30

yeah, I agree

#31

Any idea when the new Xeon’s are released? It’s been a while now… still no news?

#32

They’ve been available for about a month.

#33

CPU’s by themselves are out and a few vendors are selling systems with them. A lot of the big name companies aren’t selling systems with the higher-end new xeons yet (not listed online anyway) or maybe if you give them or call they might have them available.

#34

Yeah, still no 20-cores for the Z820. Ah well…

#35

Here you go.

Stock configurations of Z820 easily found on HP website with Ivy Bridge Xeons

Z820 Configurator that allows you to choose any E5 Sandy or Ivy Xeon CPU

:beer:

#36

Well well well… that’s amazing!

However the configure link is not loading. Website must be down or busy. I’ll check it out a bit later.

I dont want to make a mistake when choosing and will report my configuration here to ask advices. Budget should be around 10-12000$. A gamer card should be good enough as I will use C4D and Lightwave.

#37

Yeah their website is among the worst on the entire internet…but it’s there. :beer:

#38

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