Summary

New PowerEdge servers fueled by 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors can support sixteen DIMMs per CPU and 3200 MT/s memory speeds. This DfD will compare memory bandwidth readings observed on new PowerEdge servers with Ice Lake CPU architecture against prior-gen PowerEdge servers with Cascade Lake CPU architecture.

Ice Lake CPU Architecture

3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, known as Ice Lake processors, are the designated CPU for new Dell EMC Intel PowerEdge servers, like the R650 and R750. Compared to prior-gen 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, Ice Lake architecture will support 33.3% more channels per CPU (an increase from six to eight) and 9.1% higher memory speeds (an increase from 2933 MT/s to 3200 MT/s.)

Performance Data

To quantify the impact of this increase in memory support, two studies were performed. The first study (see Figure 1) measured memory bandwidth determined by the number of DIMMs per CPU populated. The second study (see Figure 2) measured memory bandwidth determined by the number of CPU thread cores. Both STREAM bandwidth benchmarks have Ice Lake populated with eight 3200 MT/s DIMMs per channel, and Cascade Lake populated with six 2933 MT/s DIMMs per channel.

Figure 1 – Ice Lake and Cascade Lake bandwidth comparison by # of DIMMs per CPU

Figure 2 – Ice Lake and Cascade Lake bandwidth comparison by # of CPU core threads