Intel Xeon E-2186G Benchmarks and Review of the Top End

Intel Xeon E-2186G Power Consumption

We wanted to post a few figures from our testing that show the real selling point of the chips, low power.

Idle is around 37W and maximum power consumption hits just under 126W in our test bed. Although the increase in TDP does not translate directly to increased power consumption, the Intel Xeon E-2186G we are not going to recommend for extremely power constrained environments like 1A in 110V or 120V rack deployments. For the low-cost colocation world, this is not the best option.

Note these results were taken using a 208V Schneider Electric / APC PDU at 17.7C and 72% RH. Our testing window shown here had a +/- 0.3C and +/- 2% RH variance. We double-checked on our 120V racks and were able to get power consumption over that common 1A threshold.

Intel Xeon E-2186G Market Positioning

Thes chips are not released in a vacuum instead, they have competition on both the Intel and AMD sides. When you purchase a server and select a CPU, it is important to see the value of a platform versus its competitors.

Intel Xeon E-2186G v. Intel Alternatives

Comparing generation on generation, the Intel Xeon E-2186G is a major improvement over the Intel Xeon E3-1280 V6 and E3-1285 V6. The chips use additional power, however, the same list pricing and 50% more cores mean that the Intel Xeon E-2186G is a massive improvement. You will not be able to compete in this space using the Xeon E3-1200 V6 series as of the Intel Xeon E-2100 server re-launch. Until we have 8-core Xeon E-2100 parts, this is the current top performer in the socket.

The Intel Xeon D-2100 series still has some major advantages. The Intel Xeon D-2100 series can utilize higher capacity RDIMMs, has more memory bandwidth, and has 10GbE NICs built-in. It is hard to discount that value. The same comparison would likely apply to the Intel Xeon Scalable family where one gets more clock speed with the Intel Xeon E-2186G but misses on the platform benefits. There is a huge delta in what you can do from a platform perspective on these other platforms.

Compared to the Intel Atom C3000 series, the Intel Xeon E-2186G does not have all of the same platform features but is much faster in single-threaded workloads. The larger and more robust compute cores (as seen in our GROMACS test for example), and higher frequencies make this an option for low-cost low power 1U servers.

The decision tree branch that will lead you to the Intel Xeon E-2186G over Atom and Intel Xeon D siblings is the Intel iGPU. The iGPU is not the focus of our CPU benchmark suite, but it includes transcoding hardware support that may be of interest to some deployments with supporting software. One can use BMC graphics for day-to-day management and offload transcoding to dedicated hardware logic not present in mainstream Intel Xeon CPUs outside of the Xeon E-2100 line. If your application can utilize video features or even transcoding offload for Quick Sync video, then the Intel Xeon E-2186G is the option to choose.

One other important comparison needs to be made, within the same generation. Our pick in this lineup is the Intel Xeon E-2146G. The Intel Xeon E-2146G has all of the same features as the Xeon E-2186G but with lower clock speeds and lower power consumption. What one loses in performance, one gains in the ability to safely deploy under a 1A 120V envelope. Adding 300MHz base and 200MHz max turbo clocks come at an almost 50% price premium. If you need the best performance, that premium is justified. In this segment where entire servers can cost $600-1000, adding $140 more for that speed boost is not going to be worth it for most users.

Intel Xeon E-2186G v. AMD EPYC

At the time of this writing, AMD EPYC does not have a real competitor to the Intel Xeon E-2176G for servers. One can use an AMD Ryzen but until we see platforms like the Tyan Tomcat EX S8015 hit the market, and from multiple vendors, AMD’s excellent compute performance with Ryzen 2 is lost by not having platforms with features like IPMI. If someone wanted to use a consumer platform without management, then Ryzen is an option, but the market for that is very small. A year and a half into the Ryzen adventure, the ecosystem is still not picking up the slack.

Final Words

If you were a buyer of the Intel Xeon E3-1285 V6 or previous E3-128x or E3-1290 CPUs, the Intel Xeon E-2186G offers a compelling upgrade opportunity. We think the addition of two cores is compelling enough that it is worth re-establishing hardware baselines to utilize the new chips. At the same time, from a value perspective, we think that most users will look towards the Xeon E-2146G as that offers most of the performance, but at a substantially reduced cost. There are some high-end and compelling solutions in the market for the Intel Xeon E-2186G. For example, paired with a high-end tower in this segment like the Dell EMC PowerEdge T340 that is in our lab, we think the Xeon E-2186G is a great fit. There is something compelling about six high-speed cores, manageable power consumption, an integrated GPU, and lower-cost platforms. Here, the Intel Xeon E-2186G excels.