Intel Xeon Gold 6134 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: 211W
- 100% Load: 253W
- Peak: 258W
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.
Intel Xeon Gold 6134 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 value of a platform versus its competitors.
Intel Xeon Gold 6134 v. Intel Xeon
If you are in a per-core licensing model, a $1000-1500 premium for an Intel Xeon Gold 6134 over an Intel Xeon Silver 4116 is an obvious optimization. The real competition comes from the Intel Xeon Gold 6144 which sits above this in the SKU stack with a 3.5GHz base clock at an $800 premium. Looking down the stack there are SKUs with 4 cores like the Xeon Gold 5122 and Silver 4112 and a 6 core option, the Gold 6128, but those carry lower performance figures.
If you do not need the most per-core performance, an Intel Xeon Gold 6132 is a better choice in this price range.
Intel Xeon Gold 6134 v. AMD EPYC
On the AMD EPYC side, this is a segment where AMD is less competitive outside of a single use case. If you have per-core licensing, and you need over 768GB of RAM, and you do not need much CPU power, and having more NUMA nodes is not an issue, then an AMD EPYC 7251 may be worth looking into. Otherwise, AMD optimizes by giving more core for a given price point but does not have a highly optimized SKU for per-core licensing models.
Final Words
The Intel Xeon Gold 6134 is one of our favorite SKUs for per-core licensing optimization. For general purpose parts, there are clearly better options. At the same time, the fact that Intel has such a highly optimized part is excellent. The Intel Xeon Gold 6134 clock speeds change system performance in an interesting manner. You could easily use these CPUs in a high-end workstation as the clock speeds are high enough to give a pleasant user experience even in that scenario. That is different than the lower-end Xeon Silver and Gold CPUs that are limited to lower base and turbo clocks. Still, if you are running Windows Server or a similar application where you are paying per-core, these are the CPUs to look at.
Don’t get it. Seems that even the weakest Epyc cpu beats the 6134 on every single benchmark apart from AVX512. Does that make the 6134 “less competitive apart from a single use case”?
*Doesn’t that make…
Funny how AMD is winning all bench marks hands down…. by a wide margin. AMD is back in the Game…
The author of this article is a clown.
These are specifically designed for running software with per-core licensing. While the benchmarks are mostly being shown on a total sum basis, the metric you would want to look at here is performance per core. In many of the micro benchmarks (e.g. c-ray), EPYC does very well. Larger application benchmarks (Linux Kernel Compile for example) show per-core performance on EPYC is nowhere near Intel’s frequency optimized parts.
For folks used to consumer level or purely open source software, EPYC may seem like a clear winner here. For those who pay software license per-core, EPYC can cost tens of thousands more per socket for the same amount of performance.
Thanks for the reply Patrick.
Which benchmark in this review shows per core perfomance? What is the difference exactly? It is not obvious from the tests in the review.
Take a look at Linux Kernel Compile benchmark (behaves more like an application than the micro benchmarks) and divide the Gold 6134 numbers by 8 and the EPYC 7301/ 7351P numbers and divide by 16 as an example. Intel is 60-70% faster per core on a loaded system.
Thanks Patrick. Which compiler was it used for this?
Also 7301 is about $850, 7351 about $1100 and 6134 $2200. It would be interesting to see a price/single core perf ratio and also energy consumed/single core perf under load for all (I suspect the latter would also favor the xeon).
gcc – but the answer to your question is not the price of the CPU, instead, it is the price of the licenses. Just different tools for different jobs.
Depends on the scale. If initial purchase cost + cost of running allow it, one could licence 2 cores for near the price of 1. Was it gcc8? It would be nice to see LLVM Clang 5 and Open64.