Intel Xeon E5-2600 & R2000GZ Sandy Bridge-EP Server Review

wPrime

wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton’s method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we’re sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum.

Benchmark Results: The pair of Intel Xeon E5-2660 CPU’s in the Intel Grizzly Pass server pretty much rocked everything I have tested in the past. With an average time of 4.097 seconds for the 32M tests it is significantly faster than the Intel Core i7 2600K which takes ~7.3 seconds to complete the test. We weren’t to surprised by this since the Grizzly Pass server from Intel has 32 threads of processing power, four times that of the 2600K. We were a little bit surprised that it wasn’t faster, but watching the task manager the 32M test was nearly done by the time that the Intel Xeon E5-2660 CPU’s were ramped up to full throttle. Firing up the 1024M test the Intel Grizzly Pass server was able to complete the test in an average of 81.173 seconds! In comparison the Intel Core i7 2600K takes ~225 seconds and the Intel Core i7 3960X takes 146.111 seconds. The i7 3960X doesn’t come close even when overclocked to 4.8GHz, at that speed it takes ~119 seconds!