Intel® Xeon® E-2300 Processor Series
Download PDFTue, 17 Jan 2023 07:29:03 -0000
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Summary
The next-generation of entry level PowerEdge rack and tower servers (T150, T350, R250 & R350) are powered by the Intel® Xeon® E-2300 processor series. These CPUs are unique in that they were primarily designed for small-business customers. By focusing on maintaining a low cost, while simultaneously refining the architecture to include new capabilities and feature sets most relevant to SMB, Intel has developed a high- performing CPU for budget- conscious customers. This DfD was written to educate readers on why the latest Xeon® E-2300 series outperforms its predecessor and how SMB PowerEdge customers will benefit from these offerings in the next- generation of entry-level PowerEdge racks & towers.
Introduction
The next-generation of entry-level PowerEdge rack and tower servers (T150, T350, R250, R350) are the perfect solution for small business customers that want a high-quality server at an affordable price. This doctrine extends especially to the CPU, or the brains of the server. Historically, Intel® Xeon® E-series CPUs have done an excellent job in finding the ‘price vs. performance’ sweet spot, as seen with previous-generation Xeon® E-2200 series on past PowerEdge products, such as the T140 or T340. Intel’s new Xeon® E-2300 CPU series for next-generation PowerEdge rack and tower servers only continues the advancement of this affordable processor line – refining the features, performance, and security aspects most essential to small business customers.
So how well do the two Intel processor generations compare? Well, that is your call to make. We hope that the Xeon® E-2300 processor details presented below will excite customers for the new PowerEdge T150, T350, R250 and R350.
New Core Architecture Improves Performance
The Cypress Cove CPU microarchitecture delivers a 19% increase of IPC (instructions per cycle), while also increasing IGP cores, L1/L2 cache speeds, and DMI lanes. These improvements combined are expected to increase the total CPU performance by up to 28% when compared to the previous-generation, and will boost performance for virtually all SMB, Edge and remote office use cases.
Memory speeds have increased by 20%, jumping from 2666MT/s to 3200MT/s. Additionally, the max memory capacity for all Xeon® E- 2300 SKUs is now 128GB – 2x as much as most Xeon® E-2200 SKUs. Having twice as much data stored with faster DIMM speeds will significantly reduce data transfer times for memory-intensive workloads like databases, CRM, ERP, or Exchange.
PCIe support has also vastly improved, with support for 20 lanes of PCIe Gen4. This results in 2x more throughput per lane (16GT/s PCIe Gen4 vs 8GT/s PCIe Gen3) and 25% more lanes (20 lanes vs. 16 lanes) than the previous-generation. Features that support PCIe Gen4, like Dell Technologies HBA355i (Non-RAID) and H755 (RAID) storage controllers, will utilize this support to increase bandwidth.
Added Features to Expand Capability
The latest Xeon® E-2300 series also introduced support for multiple new features that will expand its capabilities:
- Legacy Boot support has been deprecated by Intel and replaced with the superior UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot, which has better programmability, greater scalability, and higher security. UEFI Secure Boot also provides faster booting times and support for 9ZBs, while legacy BIOS is limited to 2.2TBs.
- Support for the latest Windows Server 2022 operating system, delivers the essential server performance, expandability and reliability small businesses depend on to support their critical business and customer data needs.
- 1 DDI (DP/HDMI) port of up to 4K/60fps resolution is supported with the intention to drive a display without the need for a discrete graphics card. One concurrent, independent display is also supported with Integrated HDCP 2.3.
Exceptional SGX Security
Customers who purchase the latest Xeon® E-2300 series will also inherit Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) baked into their CPUs. SGX security provides maximum protection by encrypting sections of memory to create highly secured environments to store targeted, sensitive data. Sensitive data like key protection, multi-party enterprise blockchain, AI/ML algorithm protection, and always-encrypted databases are protected even when the attacker has full control of the platform! This feature is an instrumental security feature for customers that consistently transfer data between the cloud and the client.
Final Words
The Xeon® E-2300 processor series is the most cost-effective Intel® offering, designed to deliver the performance, reliability, security, and management capabilities needed by small businesses to process and protect their critical business and customer data. When combined with the next- generation of entry-level PowerEdge racks and towers, customers can adequately tackle a broad variety of multi-user applications including email, messaging, print servers, calendar programs, databases, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and other software that facilitates data sharing and collaboration.
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Intel® Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters for New PowerEdge Servers
Mon, 16 Jan 2023 13:44:21 -0000
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Summary
New PowerEdge servers with 3rd Generation Intel Xeon scalable processors were made to support dense workloads, such as machine learning, data analytics and supercomputing. These types of heavy-duty computing require strong networking performance to deliver a fast and consistent I/O experience. Intel has released 800 Series network adapters to supplement these high-caliber workloads. This 1-page DfD will explain what the 800 Series network adapters are, and how they provide premium networking performance to the datacenter.
Overview
Intel has released the Ethernet 800 Series network adapters alongside their 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® scalable processors. The 800 Series adapters on new Dell EMC PowerEdge servers provide storage performance over the network that approaches performance readouts of direct-attached storage. PowerEdge customers seeking to support dense workloads, such as ML/DL, data analytics and supercomputing, should consider using the 800 Series network adapters over RDMA protocols for adequate networking performance.
Key Features
• ADQ (Application Device Ques) allows users to assign ques to key workloads. ADQ technology increases throughput/predictability and reduces latency/jitter for assigned que groups
• DDP (Dynamic Device Personalization) allows users to customize packet filtering for Cloud and NFV workloads- improving packet processing efficiency
• RDMA iWARP and RoCEv2 support provides high speed and low latency connectivity by eliminating three major sources of overhead; TCP/IP stack process, memory copies and application context switches
• PCIe Gen4 support allows network bandwidth to increase by ~2x
• 25GbE dual port support to increase networking speeds and bandwidths
Performance for 100Gb 800 Series Network Adapter
A performance study was conducted to compare the networking IOPS for NVMe drives on a PowerEdge R740xd. The study compared locally attached NVMe drives with network attached NVMe drives mounted through NVMe over Fabrics using RDMA over Ethernet on Intel E810 network adapters. Figure 1 shows that for four NVMe drives, the IOPS readouts are nearly identical. Six and eight drive configurations have up to ~15 percent networking performance variation. This indicates that although locally attached storage typically yields the best performance, NVMe over Fabrics network attached storage using the E810 network adapter is an excellent alternative when PCIe lanes cannot be dedicated for a locally attached NVMe connection.
*To learn more about the Intel Ethernet 800 Series, visit intel.com/ethernet
Figure 1 – NVMe IOPS for E810 adapter (over iWARP/RoCEv2) vs. direct attached
Intel 4th Gen Xeon featuring QAT 2.0 Technology Delivers Massive Performance Uplift in Common Cipher Suites
Sat, 27 Apr 2024 15:07:09 -0000
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Intel QAT Hardware v2.0 acceleration running on 16G PowerEdge delivers on performance for ISPs - Lab Tested and Proven
Introduction
The Internet as we know it would simply not be possible without encryption technologies. This technology lets us perform secure communication and information exchange over public networks. If you buy a pair of shoes from an online retailer, the payment information you provide is encrypted with such a high level of security that extracting your credit card information from ciphertext would be nearly an impossible task for even a supercomputer. The shoes might not end up fitting, but if the requisite encryption and secure communication tech is properly implemented, your payment information remains a secret known only to you and the entity receiving payment.
This domain of security requires hardware that is up to the task of performing handshakes, key exchanges, and other algorithmic tasks at an expeditious speed.
As we’ll demonstrate through extensive testing and proven results in our lab, Intel’s QAT 2.0 Hardware Accelerator featured on Gen4 Xeon processors is a performant and dev friendly choice to supercharge your encryption workloads. This feature is readily available on our current products across the PowerEdge Server portfolio.
What is QAT?
QAT, or “Quick Assist Technology” is an Intel technology that accelerates two common use cases: encryption acceleration and compression/decompression acceleration. In this tech note, we look at the encryption side of the QAT Accelerator feature set and explore leveraging QAT to speed up cipher suites used in deployments of OpenSSL–a common software library used by a vast array of websites and applications to secure their communications.
But before we start, let’s briefly touch on the lineage and history of QAT. QAT was introduced back in 2007, initially available as a discrete add-in PCIe card. A little further on in its evolution, QAT found a home in Intel Chipsets. Now, with the introduction of the 4th Gen Xeon processor, the silicon required to enable QAT acceleration has been added to the SOC. The hardware being this close to the processor has increased performance and reduced the logistical complexity of having to source and manage an external device.
For a complete list of the QAT Hardware v2.0’s cryptosystem and algorithms support, see: https://github.com/intel/QAT_Engine/blob/master/docs/features.md#qat_hw-features
QAT hardware acceleration may not be the fastest method to accelerate all ciphers or algorithms. With this in mind, QAT Hardware Acceleration (also called QAT_HW) can peacefully co-exist with QAT Software Acceleration (or QAT_SW). This configuration, while somewhat complex, is well supported by clear documentation. Fundamentally, this configuration relies on a method to ensure that the maximum performance is extracted for all inputs given what resources are available on the system. Allowing for use of an algorithm bitmap to dynamically choose between and prioritize the use of QAT_HW and QAT_SW based on hardware availability and which method offers the best performance.
Next we'll look at setting up QATlib and see what the performance looks like using OpenSSL Speed and a few common cipher suites.
Lab Test Setup and Notes
For this test we use a Dell PowerEdge R760. This is Dell’s mainstream 2U dual socket 4th Gen Xeon offering and features support for nearly all of Intel’s QAT enabled CPUs. Xeon gen4 CPUs that feature on-chip QAT HW 2.0 will have 1, 2 or 4 QAT endpoints per socket. We selected the Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 5420+ CPU that features 1 QAT endpoint for our testing. All else being equal, more endpoints allow for more QAT Hardware acceleration work to be done and allow greater performance in QAT HW accelerated use cases per socket.
As this is not a deployment guide, we’re going to use a RHEL 9.2 install as our operating system and run bare metal for our tests. Our primary resource for setting up QAT Hardware Version 2.0 Acceleration is the excellent QAT documentation found on Intel’s github here: https://intel.github.io/quickassist/index.html
Following the guide, we can simply install from RPM sources, ensure kernel drivers are loaded and we’re about ready to go.
Performance
First up, we’ll take a look at probably the most common public key asymmetric cipher suite, RSA. On the Internet RSA finds its home as a key exchange and signature method used to secure communication and confirm identities. In these graphs we’re comparing the speed of the RSA Sign and Verify algorithm using symmetric QAT_HW vs symmetric QAT off (using OpenSSLs default engine).
The following graphic shows a representation of a TLS handshake. This provides a bit of context concerning the role of the server in key exchange and handshakes.
Greater than 240% performance increase in OpenSSL RSA Verify using QAT Hardware Acceleration Engine vs Default Open SSL Engine.(1)
Testing in our labs shows that enabling QAT offers 240% greater algorithmic operations. The result for this performance improvement could be the implementation of greater security capacity per node without the risk of negative impact on QoS.
Next we’ll look at the industry standard elliptical curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA), specifically P-384. QAT HW supports both P-256 and P-384, with both offering exceptional performance vs the default OpenSSL engine. ECDSA is a commonly used as a key agreement protocol by many Internet messaging apps.
ECDSA example
Over 30x improvement in ECDSA P384 Sign-in OpenSSL using QAT Hardware Acceleration Engine vs Default OpenSSL Engine(2)
Both of these algorithms provide the level of protection that today’s server security specialists require. However, both are quite different in many aspects.
This vast performance improvement in secure key exchange offers more secure and uncompromised communication without degrading performance.
Conclusion
Intel’s QAT 2.0 Hardware acceleration offers substantial performance improvements for algorithms found in commonly used cipher suites. Also, QAT’s ample documentation and long history of use coupled with these new findings on performance should remove any reservations that a customer might have in deploying these security accelerators. Security at the server silicon level is critical to a modern and uncompromised data center. There is definite value in deploying QAT and a clear path towards realizing accelerated performance in their data center environments.
Legal disclosures
- Based on August 2023 Dell labs testing subjecting the PowerEdge R760 to OpenSSL Speed test running synchronously with default engine vs asynchronous with QAT Hardware Engine. Actual results will vary.
- Based on August 2023 Dell labs testing subjecting the PowerEdge R760 to OpenSSL Speed test running synchronously with default engine vs asynchronous with QAT Hardware Engine. Actual results will vary.