Why You Shouldn’t Use an Intel Xeon Silver Processor for SQL Server

By: Glenn Berry
Posted on: April 27, 2019 2:31 pm

Introduction

Intel has four main segments in their Second Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Family. These include Xeon Bronze, Xeon Silver, Xeon Gold, and Xeon Platinum. The reason why there are six boxes in Figure 1 is because Intel further segments this with two Xeon Platinum product segments and two Xeon Gold product segments. This is typical over-segmentation by Intel, but it is just the tip of the iceberg as far as their product segmentation goes. That is a topic for another blog post!


2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable

Figure 1: Second Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Segments


Modern SQL Server Licensing

Since SQL Server 2012, Microsoft has used core-based licensing rather than socket-based licensing. For non-virtualized servers, you buy core licenses in two-packs, with a minimum of four processor core licenses per physical CPU. These correspond to physical processor cores, not logical processor cores, so Intel HT and AMD SMT is a free benefit. This can give you roughly 25% more overall CPU capacity (certainly not 100% like you might assume by just counting total logical cores).

With virtualized servers, you also buy core licenses in two-packs, with a minimum of four processor core licenses per virtual machine. These correspond to virtual processor cores, which might map to logical cores or physical cores, depending on whether Intel HT or AMD SMT is enabled on the host machine. If you license all of the physical cores on the virtualization host and you have Microsoft Software Assurance, you can forget about counting vCPUs in your VMs, and you can configure them anyway you want to.

A key fact here is that Microsoft does not change the license pricing based on the actual performance of a processor core. It doesn’t matter how old or new the processor is, it doesn’t matter how slow or fast it is, the price per core is exactly the same. You need to be aware of this, and keep it in mind as you select the exact processor to use for SQL Server. Otherwise, you will be losing performance and scalability, or paying for too many SQL Server core licenses, or some combination of both. Each SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition core license is $7,128.00.


Intel Xeon Gold Processor Family

The Intel Xeon Gold Processor Family is divided between the entry level two or four-socket Gold 5200 family and the enhanced two or four-socket Gold 6200 family. According to Intel,

“With support for the higher memory speeds, enhanced memory capacity, and four-socket scalability, Intel® Xeon® Gold processors deliver significant improvement in performance, advanced reliability, and hardware-enhanced security. It is optimized for demanding mainstream data center, multi-cloud compute, and network and storage workloads. With up-to four-socket scalability, it is suitable for an expanded range of workloads.”

I think the Intel Gold Processor Family is the sweet spot for most SQL Server workloads. It lets you choose from between 4 and 22 physical cores, with frequency-optimized, lower core count SKUs being available. This lets you get higher single-threaded CPU performance while minimizing your physical core counts, which lets you minimize your SQL Server license costs.


Intel Xeon Silver Processor Family

The Intel Xeon Silver Processor Family is for “enhanced” two-socket servers. According to Intel,

“Intel® Xeon® Silver processors deliver essential performance, improved memory speed, and power efficiency. Hardware-enhanced performance required for entry data center computes, network, and storage.”

Compared to the entry level Intel Xeon Bronze Processor Family, the Silver Family offers hyper-threading, Turbo Boost, DDR4-2400 support, and larger L3 cache sizes. This makes the Bronze family an even worse choice for SQL Server usage.

According to Intel,

“The Intel® Xeon® Bronze processors delivers entry performance for small business and basic storage servers. Hardware-enhanced reliability, availability, and serviceability features designed to meet the needs of these entry solutions.”


Processor Shootout

Let’s compare the Intel Xeon Silver 4208 processor to the Intel Xeon Gold 6244 processor. These are both Second Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Cascade Lake-SP), using the same microarchitecture, so we can directly compare them.

The 14nm Intel Xeon Silver 4208 processor has 8 cores/16 threads with a Base clock speed of 2.10 GHz and a Max Turbo clock speed of 3.20 GHz. It has an 11MB L3 cache and supports DDR4-2400 memory. It has two Ultra Path Interconnect (UPI) links and can scale up to two sockets. It does not support Intel Optane DC Persistent memory. Its thermal design power (TDP) is 85 watts and it has one AVX-512 FMA unit. It has a recommended customer price of $417.00.

The 14nm Intel Xeon Gold 6244 processor has 8 cores/16 threads with a Base clock speed of 3.60GHz and a Max Turbo clock speed of 4.40GHz. It has an 25MB L3 cache and supports DDR4-2933 memory. It has three Ultra Path Interconnect (UPI) links and can scale up to four sockets. It does support Intel Optane DC Persistent memory. Its thermal design power (TDP) is 150 watts and it has two AVX-512 FMA units. It has a recommended customer price of $2,925.00.

You might be thinking “Wow, that is a big difference in the cost of the processors. I could save over $5,000.00 in a two-socket server by choosing the Silver processor instead of the Gold processor”. That is true, but lets take a look at what you would lose by doing that.

If your server has a typical CPU load, most of your processor cores will be running at their base clock speed most of the time. This makes the base clock speed a very important metric for SQL Server usage. There is a huge difference (71.4%) between 2.10 GHz and 3.60 GHz. The base clock speed of the Gold 6244 is actually higher than the Turbo clock speed of the Silver 4208. If your power management is properly configured for best performance, you will always be running a higher clock speed on all cores of the Xeon Gold 6244 than the Xeon Silver 4208 can ever run, even on a single core at full turbo boost speed. The Turbo clock speed difference between the two processors is 37.5%.

The L3 cache of the Gold 6244 is more than twice the size of the Silver 4208. This means there is a much better chance of finding the data you need for a query in the L3 cache rather than in your main DRAM memory. If you do have to go out to main DRAM, your DDR4-2933 memory with the Xeon Gold 6244 will be noticeably faster than the DDR4-2400 memory with the Xeon Silver 4208.


Comparing Estimated TPC-E Scores

So far, there has been one official TPC-E benchmark score on a system with Second Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. It is for a two-socket Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650, with two Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors. This system had a TPC-E Throughput score of 7,012.53. This is a decent measure of the CPU capacity of this system. We can use this actual score as a baseline for comparison against other Intel processors from the same generation.

Since this system has a total of 56 physical cores, we can divide 7012.53 by 56 to get a score/core of 125.22, which is a good measure of the single-threaded performance of this processor. Remember, this submission is for a system running SQL Server 2017, so it is not just a synthetic benchmark.

For a simple but relatively accurate comparison, we can adjust this score to account for the difference in the number of physical cores and the difference in the base clock speeds between the processor used for the actual TPC-E submission and any other processor from that same generation.

Here is the math for both processors:


Intel Xeon Gold 6244     16 cores/56 cores = .29 core count adjustment      3.60 GHz / 2.70 GHz = 1.33 base clock speed adjustment

7012.53 times 0.29 equals 2003.58, then 2003.58 times 1.33 equals a 2671.44 total estimated score

If we take this total estimated score of 2671.44 divided by 16 total physical cores in the system, we get an estimated 166.97 score/core


Intel Xeon Silver 4208   16 cores/56 cores = .29 core count adjustment      2.10 GHz / 2.70 GHz = 0.78 base clock speed adjustment

7012.53 times 0.29 equals 2003.58, then 2003.58 times 0.78 equals a 1558.34 total estimated score

If we take this total estimated score of 1558.34 divided by 16 total physical cores in the system, we get an estimated 97.40 score/core


Conclusion

These calculation results show that we would have significantly more capacity and much better single-threaded CPU performance with the Intel Xeon Gold 6244 compared to the Intel Xeon Silver 4208. From a SQL Server perspective, the $5000.00 lower hardware cost would be a minor consideration compared to the $114,048.00 license cost for SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition.

This methodology does not account for factors such as total L3 cache size, L3 cache size per core, memory speed, and number of UPI links. If these were factored in, the Intel Xeon Gold 6244 would do even better compared to both the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 and the Intel Xeon Silver 4208.

The difference is so stark that I would consider dropping down to the four-core Intel Xeon Gold 5222 processor, which would save me $56,024.00 in SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition license costs on a two-socket system. Unfortunately, Intel has not released a six-core Intel Xeon Gold 6228 processor to replace the old Intel Xeon Gold 6128 processor, so we have a big gap between the Xeon Gold 5222 and the Xeon Gold 6244.

Another alternative would be to have just one Intel Xeon Gold 6244 processor in a two-socket system. If you did that, you would lose half your total memory capacity and half of your total PCIe 3.0 lanes.

A recent conversation on Twitter prompted this post. I would love to hear your thoughts on this either in the comments section or on Twitter. I am GlennAlanBerry on Twitter.




Posted in: Cascade, Cascade Lake-SP, Intel, Upgrading SQL Server
4 Comments

Intel Optane Technology and SQL Server

By: Glenn Berry
Posted on: April 13, 2019 6:29 pm

You may have heard of Intel Optane Technology, but perhaps you aren’t quite sure what that term actually refers to, and whether it is relevant for SQL Server. Unfortunately, Intel Optane is an overloaded marketing term that covers several different product categories and specific products. Intel also has Optane product offerings for the consumer market, which further confuses the issue.

All of these different products use 3D-XPoint (pronounced 3D Cross Point) technology in different ways for different purposes. First, we have their consumer products.

Consumer Products

Intel Optane Memory Series (Stony Beach, Q1 2017)

Intel Optane Memory M10 Series (Stony Beach, Q1 2018)

Intel Optane Memory H10 with Solid State Storage (Teton Glacier, Q2, 2019)

Intel Optane SSD 800P Series (Brighton Beach, Q1 2018)

Intel Optane SSD 900P Series (Mansion Beach, Q4 2017)

Intel Optane SSD 905P Series (Mansion Beach, Q3 2018)

Their consumer products include system accelerators that are a cache layer in front of a magnetic HDD or slow SATA NAND SSD. These include the Intel Optane Memory and Intel Optane Memory M10 Series of products. These are useful for their intended purpose, but some systems vendors are making dubious marketing claims about them. You will see new systems that claim to have 24GB of “Memory” that turns out to actually be 16GB of Intel Optane Memory and 8GB of DDR4 DRAM. This is confusing to a typical consumer, and somewhat deceptive in my opinion. Figure 1 shows an example of this.


24GB of Memory

Figure 1: New Laptop with 24GB of “Memory”


The Intel Optane Memory H10 with Solid State Storage series are hybrid storage M.2 2280 devices that combine Optane SSD storage as a cache in front of QLC NAND SSD storage on a single M.2 2280 card. They have 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of usable capacity for storage. These should give close to Optane SSD storage performance for less intense workloads at a lower cost than a 100% Optane SSD.

There are also pure Optane SSD storage offerings such as the 800P, 900P, and 905P that give the best storage performance from the consumer line. I have a couple of Intel Optane 900P PCIe NVMe storage cards in two of my personal desktop systems, and I have been very impressed with them over the past 18 months. Both the 900P and newer, faster 905P series products are a great choice for an OS drive for a developer or DBA desktop workstation. They also work very well in gaming rigs.


Data Center Products

Intel also has a number of different data center product lines under the Optane umbrella.

Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series (Cold Stream, Q4 2017)

Intel Optane SSD DC P4801X Series (Cold Stream, Q1 2019)

Intel Optane SSD DC D4800X Series (Q2 2019)

Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory (Apache Pass, Q2 2019)


Intel has a pyramid diagram that they like to show to explain where these data center products fit in the modern data access hierarchy.

Intel Storage Pyramid

Figure 2: Intel Data Access Pyramid

Here are some more details about Intel’s Optane Data Center products.

Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series

These are extremely high performance block storage devices that include 375GB, 750GB, and 1.5TB capacities. They are available in HHHL AIC and U.2 15mm form factors. They all have a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface and use the NVMe protocol. Most existing servers will be able to use these in the HHHL AIC form factor in an available PCIe 3.0 x4 expansion slot. It is common to use two of these cards in a Storage Spaces RAID 1 array for redundancy. They are also well-suited for AG nodes.

These can be used with any version of SQL Server and any relatively recent version of Windows Server. You will want to make sure that you use the Intel Datacenter NVMe driver rather than the generic Microsoft NVMe driver with these drives.

Once you have a couple of these cards, you can use them for pretty much anything you want for SQL Server usage. For example, you can have your tempdb files here, or perhaps your transaction log files. I have had some clients simply move all of their data, log, and tempdb files to Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X arrays. These cards currently run about $4.00-5.00/GB, which is more expensive than most enterprise NAND flash storage, but not outrageously so.

They offer excellent random read and write performance at low queue depths, extremely low latency, predictable and steady performance under load, along with greater write endurance than NAND-based flash. They also do not lose any performance as they get full. Here are some articles and reviews of these drives:


Using Intel Optane Storage for SQL Server

The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Review

Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X – 3D XPoint Has Landed

Intel Optane SSD DC P4801X Series

These are PCIe NVMe M.2 22110 (110mm) cards that range from 100GB to 375GB in capacity. They have the same technology and main specifications as the larger form factor Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series cards. Not as many existing servers have PCIe M.2 slots, but an increasing number of new servers do have PCIe M.2 slots. As long as your server supports this form factor, you can use them the same way you would as the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series cards. You can also get M.2 to PCIe expansion slot adapters that will let you use these M.2 cards in older servers.


Intel Optane SSD DC D4800X Series

These are Optane SSD drives that have dual-port controllers for better redundancy. These were just announced at the Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day on April 2, 2019. So far, they are not in the Intel ARK database, and they don’t appear to be readily available yet.


Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory

This is the product line that is newer and less familiar to many people. These are persistent memory modules that also use 3D-XPoint technology. They fit in DDR4 memory slots on servers with selected 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake-SP). They are available in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities. If you have the requisite processor and supported operating system or hypervisor, you can use Optane DC PM modules in a system along with conventional DDR4 DRAM modules. You can have up to six persistent memory modules per processor, but you have to have at least one DRAM module per processor.

You can use Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory in one of three modes. These are Memory Mode, APP Direct mode, and Storage over APP Direct mode.

Memory Mode

Memory Mode is when you use Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules to increase the total size of your memory by using the larger capacity Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules in place of some of your DDR4 DRAM DIMMs. You use some (up to half) of your RAM slots to hold Intel Optane PMEM DIMMs. You put regular DDR4-2933 DRAM in your other memory slots, which is then invisible to the OS. The Intel Optane PMEM is less expensive per GB compared to 128GB DDR4-2933 DIMMs, and it is available in higher capacities than you can get with DDR4 DRAM.

In this mode, the DDR4 DRAM is “near memory” which is used as a write-back cache. The Optane PMEM is the “far memory”, which actually shows up as the amount of memory visible to the operating system. The ratio of the near/far memory can vary. A common recommendation from Intel is a 4:1 capacity ratio. So for example, you could have six 128GB PMEM modules and six 32GB DDR4 DRAM modules per socket, which would give you 768GB of capacity from the PMEM, with 192GB of DRAM cache in front of it.

No application changes are required to use Memory mode. In this mode, the PMEM is volatile, which means that the data is cleared when you cycle power (just like DRAM).


App Direct Mode

In App Direct Mode, a PMEM-aware application is required. This mode adds a new tier between Memory Mode and block mode storage. It is byte addressable just like memory. With SQL Server 2019 on Linux, you can host any or all of your database files on DAX volumes that are built on Intel Optane DC PMEM modules with App Direct mode. You can also use the new Hybrid Buffer Pool feature in SQL Server 2019 with App Direct mode.


Storage over App Direct Mode

Storage over App Direct mode uses block mode storage using traditional read/write instructions that work with existing file systems. You must have an NVDIMM driver for this mode to be supported. This will have higher latency than App Direct mode, but it doesn’t require any application changes. This means that legacy versions of SQL Server should be able to use this mode.


Hybrid Buffer Pool

SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.1 introduced a new feature called Hybrid Buffer Pool. This feature allows the database engine to directly access data pages in database data files that are stored on PMEM DAX volume devices using APP Direct Mode.

In a traditional system without persistent memory, SQL Server caches data pages in the DRAM buffer pool. With Hybrid Buffer Pool, SQL Server skips performing a copy of the page into the DRAM-based portion of the buffer pool, and instead references the page directly on the database file that lives on a PMEM DAX volume device.

Access to data files in PMEM for Hybrid Buffer Pool is performed using memory-mapped I/O, also known as enlightenment. This brings performance benefits from avoiding the copy of the page to DRAM, and from skipping the I/O stack of the operating system to access the page on the persistent memory storage volume. Only clean pages can be referenced directly on a PMEM device. When a page becomes dirty it is kept in DRAM, and then eventually written back to the PMEM device after it has been flushed to persistent storage.

Microsoft recommends that you use the largest allocation unit size available for NTFS (2MB in Windows Server 2019) when formatting your PMEM device on Windows and ensure the device has been enabled for DAX (Direct Access). This feature is available on both SQL Server 2019 on Windows and SQL Server 2019 on Linux. With SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.1, you need to enable startup trace flag 809 to enable this feature.


Optane Issues

If you use any Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules in your system (in any of the three modes), they run at 2666 MHz, and your regular DDR4-2933 DRAM will also run at the slower 2666 MHz speed. Intel Optane DC PMEM performs better for reads than for writes. Sequential read latency is about 170ns while sequential write latency is about 320ns. Sequential read bandwidth is about 7.6 GB/sec per DIMM, while sequential write bandwidth is only about 2.3 GB/sec per DIMM. These figures are all significantly worse than modern DDR4-2933 DRAM. Intel Optane DC PMEM in Memory mode is faster than anything else that is lower in the data retrieval pyramid, but it simply does not compare to modern DRAM performance.

Intel Optane DC PMEM is less expensive per GB compared to 128GB DDR4 DRAM modules, but not compared to lower capacity 32GB DDR4 DRAM modules. The price per GB of Intel Optane DC PMEM goes up as the capacity increases, but not as steeply as with the highest capacity DRAM modules.

Here are some relevant articles about Intel Optane products.

Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Module (PMM)

Supermicro SuperServer with Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory First Look Review

Pricing of Intel’s Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules Leaks: From $6.57 Per GB

Intel Optane DIMM Pricing: $695 for 128GB, $2595 for 256GB, $7816 for 512GB (Update)

Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory Operating Modes Explained

Intel Optane and SQL Server

After all of this, where are we with Intel Optane regarding SQL Server usage? This will depend on the Intel Optane product, your workload, and your current/desired operating environment.

Intel Optane SSD P4800X

I am a big fan of the Intel Optane SSD P4800X series of drives for on-premises SQL Server usage. They just work, on any version of SQL Server on any recent operating system on any server with PCIe 3.0 support. They don’t require 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. The only problem is their availability and relatively high price per GB of capacity.

Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory

Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory seems like a more mixed verdict. I think Memory mode is not going to be a good fit for most SQL Server workloads. Using the example from above, (with twelve 32GB DDR4-2933 DIMMs and twelve 128GB Optane PMEM DIMMs in a two-socket server) you would have 384GB of near memory cache in front of 1,536GB of Optane in Memory mode, all running at a 2666 MHz speed. Once your working set exceeds 384GB, you will be hitting the much slower Optane far memory. The current pricing breakdown for this configuration would be about $2,700 for twelve 32GB DDR4-2933 DIMMs and about $9,600 for twelve 128GB Intel Optane DIMMs. This would be about $12,300 total.

In most cases, you would be better off with twenty-four 32GB DDR4-2933 DIMMs in a two-socket server, running at full speed. This configuration would give you 768GB of very fast DRAM for your buffer pool. This memory would cost about $5,400 at current prices. Saving about $7,000 is nice, (but is insignificant compared to your SQL Server core licensing costs). What is more important is the likely much better performance for most workloads from having nothing but fast DRAM rather than a mixture of DRAM and PMEM in Memory mode.

One bad scenario (for SQL Server) that I hope we don’t see is heavy Memory mode usage on Virtualization hosts. Imagine a two-socket virtualization host that has twelve 512GB Optane PMEM DIMMs and twelve 32GB DDR4-2933 DRAM DIMMs. This host would have 6,144GB of PMEM capacity, with only 384GB of DRAM cache in front of it. That might be great for web-server VMs, but probably not so great for SQL Server VMs that have a significant workload.

App Direct mode is more interesting. I think that the Hybrid Buffer Pool feature may work very well (much better than the old Buffer Pool Extension feature), and I like the fact that it is available for both SQL Server 2019 on Windows and SQL Server 2019 on Linux. You should also be able to use the Persistent log buffer feature from SQL Server 2016 with App Direct mode on both Windows and Linux. SQL Server 2019 on Linux will be “fully enlightened” which means you will be able to store any type of SQL Server database file on a DAX volume that is using Optane PMEM in App Direct mode.

Storage over App Direct mode also looks very useful. It will let you use Optane PMEM as very fast block mode storage with older versions of SQL Server, older versions of Windows Server, and possibly older versions of your favorite hypervisor. All you need is an NVDIMM driver. It will still require a server with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors though.










Posted in: Cascade Lake-SP, Intel, Intel Optane
Be the first to Reply!

Intel Cascade Lake-SP Processor Analysis for SQL Server

By: Glenn Berry
Posted on: April 2, 2019 8:43 pm

Introduction

On April 2, 2019, Intel had their Data-Centric Innovation Day, where they announced and described a number of new products for data center use. Most relevant from a SQL Server perspective is the 2nd Generation Intel Scalable Processor family, aka Cascade Lake-SP. This line of 14nm processors are the successor to the existing 14nm Intel Scalable Processor family (Skylake-SP) that was released in Q3 2017. These new processors will work with existing model servers (with a BIOS update), so there should be no delay waiting on server vendors to do a model refresh.


Cascade Lake-SP Improvements

This new family of processors has minor base and turbo clock speed improvements (typically 200 MHz). They also support DDR4-2933 RAM (at two DIMMs per channel) and 256GB LRDIMMs. This means you can have up to 1.5TB of RAM per socket, with the base, non-M or L suffix SKUs. That is a doubling of memory capacity compared to Skylake-SP. Some of the mid-range Cascade Lake-SP SKUs have larger L3 cache sizes compared to the equivalent Skylake-SP SKUs. Cascade Lake-SP also has Optane DC Persistent Memory support and hardware-level Spectre and Meltdown mitigations. Unfortunately, there is no PCIe 4.0 support with Cascade Lake-SP.


Cascade Lake-SP Regressions

There are some issues with Cascade Lake-SP for SQL Server usage. Not from a technical or performance perspective, but from a product segmentation perspective. First, Intel has introduced a number of new model number letter suffixes which make processor selection more complicated and potentially much more expensive.

The complete list of SKU suffix letters are as follows:

  • No letter = Normal Memory Support (1.5 TB)
  • M = Medium Memory Support (2.0 TB)
  • L = Large Memory Support (4.5 TB)
  • Y = Speed Select Models
  • N = Networking/NFV Specialized
  • V = Virtual Machine Density Value Optimized
  • T = Long Life Cycle/Thermal
  • S = Search Optimized

Confused yet? Suffice it say, you will want to avoid those specialized SKUs for most SQL Server usage, with the possible exception of the M or L models if you need higher memory density. Another exception might be the “Y”, Speed Select (SST) SKUs, which let you pin workloads to specific cores (which can have an increased base clock speed) while the other cores have a reduced base clock speed. Another variant of Speed Select (SST-PP) lets you vary the number of cores and clock speeds at boot time. This feature would probably be in violation of current SQL Server licensing, where Microsoft expects you to pay for all of the physical cores in a machine, whether they are enabled or not.

If you decide to use Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory, your maximum memory speed will be reduced to DDR4-2666. Intel has not released pricing for Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory yet, which means that it will be expensive (but less expensive/GB than DDR4 RAM).


Missing SKUs

A bigger issue for SQL Server usage is the fact Intel has apparently dropped at least two of their frequency-optimized SKUs from the previous generation. Based on today’s information, I don’t see a 12-core Intel Xeon Gold 6246 or a 6-core Intel Xeon Gold 6228. These would replace the previous Intel Xeon Gold 6146 and Intel Xeon Gold 6128. There don’t appear to be any 6-core SKUs outside of the Intel Xeon Bronze 3204 (which would be a terrible choice for SQL Server usage).

In fact, there are only five specific Cascade Lake-SP SKUs that I really like for SQL Server usage (if you want the best single-threaded performance possible). These include:

  • Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 (28 cores)
  • Intel Xeon Platinum 8268 (24 cores)
  • Intel Xeon Gold 6254 (18 cores)
  • Intel Xeon Gold 6244 (8 cores)
  • Intel Xeon Gold 5222 (4 cores)

All of these SKUs have slightly higher base and turbo clock speeds than their direct Skylake-SP predecessors. All of them (except the Platinum 8168) are the same price as their predecessors. The Platinum 8268 has a larger L3 cache than the Platinum 8168, which somewhat justifies a price increase. The problem is that missing 6-core SKU and the big gap between the 8-core and the 18-core SKUs. That gap represents about $142K in SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition licenses costs in a two-socket server.

Figures 1 and 2 show the main specifications for my preferred SKUs for Cascade Lake-SP and Skylake-SP (for SQL Server usage).


Cascade Lake-SP List

Figure 1: Preferred Cascade Lake-SP SKUs


As you can see, there were fewer large gaps in the core counts of these “good” processor choices for SQL Server usage with Skylake-SP.


Skylake-SP List

Figure 2: Preferred Skylake-SP SKUs


Initial TPC-E Results

We already have the first TPC-E submission for a system using Cascade Lake-SP processors. Lenovo recently submitted a result for a two-socket Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 with two Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors. This system had a score of 7012.53. If you divide that score by 56 physical cores, you get a result of 125.22/core.

Lenovo previously submitted a result for an essentially identical Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 with two Intel Xeon Platinum 8180 processors This system had a score of 6779.53. If you divide that score by 56 physical cores, you get a result of 121.06/core.

That is about a 3.4% improvement. The difference in base clock speed is 8%. Both systems are running SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2016 Standard Edition. There may be some minor configuration differences between the two systems, but I have not spelunked into the full disclosure reports to determine that yet.


Conclusion

Cascade Lake-SP will give give you marginally better performance at the same core counts compared to Skylake-SP. This is primarily due to the higher base and turbo clock speeds. Higher memory bandwidth and hardware-level Spectre/Meltdown protection will also help in some scenarios. Most of the other Cascade Lake-SP improvements are focused on HPC and AI workloads, and will not be beneficial to SQL Server 2017/2019. Intel is not claiming any significant IPC improvements in Cascade Lake-SP, which seems to be confirmed by the first TPC-E result. Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory may be useful, depending on how much you can leverage it with SQL Server 2019.

Honestly, I am pretty underwhelmed by Cascade Lake-SP so far, at least for SQL Server. It is slightly better than Skylake-SP, assuming the frequency-optimized core count gaps don’t force you to license more cores than you wanted to. Intel should be very concerned about the upcoming 7nm AMD EPYC “Rome” server processors. These AMD processors will have have up to 64C/128T, higher memory density, and more PCIe lanes (with PCIe 4.0 instead of PCIe 3.0). They also may have higher single-threaded performance than Cascade Lake-SP. This is especially likely if AMD decides to offer more frequency-optimized SKUs, like the existing AMD EPYC 7371 from the “Naples” generation.









Posted in: Cascade Lake-SP, Intel
1 Comment