Bulldozer for Servers: Testing AMD's "Interlagos" Opteron 6200 Series
by Johan De Gelas on November 15, 2011 5:09 PM ESTWhat Makes Server Applications Different?
The large caches and high integer core (cluster) count in one Orochi die (four CMT module Bulldozer die) made quite a few people suspect that the Bulldozer design first and foremost was created to excel in server workloads. Reviews like our own AMD FX-8150 launch article have revealed that single-threaded performance has (slightly) regressed compared to the previous AMD CPUs (Istanbul core), while the chip performs better in heavy multi-threaded benchmarks. However, high performance in multi-threaded workstation and desktop applications does not automatically mean that the architecture is server centric.
A more in depth analysis of the Bulldozer architecture and its performance will be presented in a later article as it is out of the scope of this one. However, many of our readers are either hardcore hardware enthusiasts or IT professionals that really love to delve a bit deeper than just benchmarks showing if something is faster/slower than the competition, so it's good to start with an explanation of what makes an architecture better suited for server applications. Is the Bulldozer architecture a “server centric architecture”?
What makes a server application different anyway?
There have been extensive performance characterizations on the SPEC CPU benchmark, which contains real-world HPC (High Performance Computing), workstation, and desktop applications. The studies of commercial web and database workloads on top of real CPUs are less abundant, but we dug up quite a bit of interesting info. In summary we can say that server workloads distinguish themselves from the workstation and desktop ones in the following ways.
They spend a lot more time in the kernel. Accessing the network stack, the disk subsystem, handling the user connections, syncing high amounts of threads, demanding more memory pages for expending caches--server workloads make the OS sweat. Server applications spend about 20 to 60% of their execution time in the kernel or hypervisor, while in contrast most desktop applications rarely exceed 5% kernel time. Kernel code tends to be very low IPC (Instructions Per Clockcycle) with lots of dependencies.
That is why for example SPECjbb, which does not perform any networking and disk access, is a decent CPU benchmark but a pretty bad server benchmark. An interesting fact is that SPECJBB, thanks to the lack of I/O subsystem interaction, typically has an IPC of 0.5-0.9, which is almost twice as high as other server workloads (0.3-0.6), even if those server workloads are not bottlenecked by the storage subsystem.
Another aspect of server applications is that they are prone to more instruction cache misses. Server workloads are more complex than most processing intensive applications. Processing intensive applications like encoders are written in C++ using a few libraries. Server workloads are developed on top of frameworks like .Net and make of lots of DLLs--or in Linux terms, they have more dependencies. Not only is the "most used" instruction footprint a lot larger, dynamically compiled software (such as .Net and Java) tends to make code that is more scattered in the memory space. As a result, server apps have much more L1 instruction cache misses than desktop applications, where instruction cache misses are much lower than data cache misses.
Similar to the above, server apps also have more L2 cache misses. Modern desktop/workstation applications miss the L1 data cache frequently and need the L2 cache too, as their datasets are much larger than the L1 data cache. But once there, few applications have significant L2 cache misses. Most server applications have higher L2 cache misses as they tend to come with even larger memory footprints and huge datasets.
The larger memory footprint and shrinking and expanding caches can cause more TLB misses too. Especially virtualized workloads need large and fast TLBs as they switch between contexts much more often.
As most server applications are easier to multi-thread (for example, a thread for each connection) but are likely to work on the same data (e.g. a relational database), keeping the caches coherent tends to produce much more coherency traffic, and locks are much more frequent.
Some desktop workloads such as compiling and games have much higher branch misprediction ratios than server applications. Server applications tend to be no more branch intensive than your average integer applications.
Quick Summary
The end result is that most server applications have low IPC. Quite a few workstation applications achieve 1.0-2.0 IPC, while many server applications execute 3 to 5 times fewer instructions on average per cycle. Performance is dominated by Memory Level Parallelism (MLP), coherency traffic, and branch prediction in that order, and to a lesser degree integer processing power.
So is "Bulldozer" a server centric architecture? We'll need a more in-depth analysis to answer this question properly, but from a high level perspective, yes, it does appear that way. Getting 16 threads and 32MB of cache inside a 115W TDP power consumption envelope is no easy feat. But let the hardware and benchmarks now speak.
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veri745 - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
Shouldn't there be 8 x 2MB L2 for Interlagos instead of just 4x?ClagMaster - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
A core this complex in my opinion has not been optimized to its fullest potential.Expect better performance when AMD introduces later steppings of this core with regard to power consumption and higher clock frequencies.
I have seen this in earlier AMD and Intel Cores, this new core will be the same.
C300fans - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
1x i7 3960x or 2x Interlagos 6272? It is up to you. Money cow.tech6 - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
We have a bunch of 6100 in our data center and the performance has been disappointing. They do no better in single thread performance than old 73xx series Xeons. While this is OK for non-interactive stuff, it really isn't good enough for much else. These results just seem to confirm that the Bulldozer series of processors is over-hyped and that AMD is in danger of becoming irrelevant in the server, mobile and desktop market.mino - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Actually, for interactive stuff (read VDI/Citrix/containers) core counts rule the roost.duploxxx - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
this is exactly what should be fixed now with the turbo when set correct, btw the 73xx series were not that bad on single thread performance, it was wide scale virtualization and IO throughput which was awefull one these systems.alpha754293 - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
"Let us first discuss the virtualization scene, the most important market." Yea, I don't know about that.Considering that they've already shipped like some half-a-million cores to the leading supercomputers of the world; where some of them are doing major processor upgrades with this new release; I wouldn't necessarily say that it's the most IMPORTANT market. Important, yes. But MOST important...I dunno.
Looking forward to more HPC benchmark results.
Also, you might have to play with thread schedule/process affinity (masks) to make it work right.
See the Techreport article.
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
Are you talking about the Euler3D benchmark?And yes, by any metric (revenue, servers sold) the virtualization market is the most important one for servers. Depending on the report 60 to 80% of the servers are bought to be virtualized.
alpha754293 - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
Folks: chip-multithreading (CMT) is nothing new.I would explain it this way: it is the physical, hardware manifestation of simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). Intel's HTT is SMT.
IBM's POWER (since I think as early as POWER4), Sun/Oracle/UltraDense's Niagara (UltraSPARC T-series), maybe even some of the older Crays were all CMT. (Don't quote me on the Crays though. MIPS died before CMT came out. API WOULD have had it probably IF there had been an EV8).
But the way I see it - remember what a CPU IS: it's a glorified calculator. Nothing else/more.
So, if it can't calculate, then it doesn't really do much good. (And I've yet to see an entirely integer-only program).
Doing integer math is fairly easy and straightforward. Doing floating-point math is a LOT harder. If you check the power consumption while solving a linear algebra equation using Gauss elimination (parallelized or using multiple instances of the solver); I can guarantee you that you will consume more power than if you were trying to run VMs.
So the way I see it, if a CPU is a glorified calculator, then a "core" is where/whatever the FPU is. Everything else is just ancillary and that point.
mino - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
1) Power is NOT CMT, it allways was a VERY(even by RISC standards) wide SMT design.2) Niagara is NOT a CMT. It is interleaved multipthreading with SMT on top.
Bulldozer indeed IS a first of its kind. With all the associated advantages(future scaling) and disadvantages(alfa version).
There is a nice debate somewhere on cpu.arch groups from the original author(think 1990's) of the CMT concept.