Intel Xeon Gold 6132 Power Consumption
We wanted to post a few figures from our testing that show the real selling point of the chips, low power.
- Idle: 76W
- 70% Load: 219W
- 100% Load: 258W
- Peak: 264W
Note these results were taken using a 208V Schneider Electric / APC PDU at 17.9C and 71% RH. Our testing window shown here had a +/- 0.3C and +/- 2% RH variance. These are great power consumption figures. These are certainly solid results for this system and a large amount of the power is not used by the CPU and instead by the RAM and peripherals.
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 Gold 6132 v. Intel Xeon
In the world of Intel Xeon the Xeon Gold 6132 provides a lot of value. It has similar single thread speeds as other Xeon Gold 6130 series CPUs. When it comes to multi-threaded applications, the 14 cores is more than either the Xeon Gold 6134 or Xeon Gold 6136 can muster.
Intel Xeon Gold 6132 v. AMD EPYC
On the AMD EPYC side, we saw a consistent pattern. The AMD EPYC platform has some extremely well-priced CPUs including the AMD EPYC 7351P and AMD EPYC 7401P. If your application can handle having four NUMA nodes instead of one, and you have per-socket licensing, then the AMD EPYC is a strong competitor. If you need single threaded performance and by extension, are paying for licensing on a per-core basis, the Intel Xeon Gold 6132 makes a lot of sense.
Final Words
Overall, Intel’s market segmentation is extremely fine-grained at this point. If you want fewer or more cores, there are SKUs for that. If you need the same number of cores but less performance and lower power consumption, there are options like the Xeon Gold 5119T available. We hope that our Intel Xeon Gold 6132 benchmarks and review provide a sense of where the chip falls in the overall SKU stack.
When you want some real speed with NAMD, Gromacs etc.. the GPU way is a lot faster and cheaper.
AVX512 is dead on arrival.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/NAMD-Performance-on-Xeon-Scalable-8180-and-8-GTX-1080Ti-GPUs-1124/
@Misha Do remember that if you can’t use GeForce GPUs, professional GPUs cost as much as or more than two high-end CPUs, will consume equal amount of power, and will often end up as a bottleneck for strong-scaling. For NAMD AVX512 may not be worth it, but NAMD does not have tuned AVX512 SIMD kernels.
However, in GROMACS we have i) redesigned the algorithms from ground-up for wide-SIMD architectures (rather than shoehorning old algorithms into wide SIMD units) ii) implemented and tuned SIMD code (note that tuning here means *both* choosing the right algorithm parameters and the right SIMD intrinsics) for a dozen+ SIMD architectures which makes our code very efficient. While GPUs will win in non-scaling runs, in strong-scaling use-cases CPU nodes are still very strong and if you consider the cost of a simulation on Tesla rather than GeForce, the advantage of GPUs will not be huge.