White Papers

Performance and Energy Efficiency of Dell PowerEdge servers with Xeon Cascade Lake

Executive summary

Introduction

Dell's refreshed PowerEdge servers are now available with Intel’s second-generation Xeon Processor Scalable family,

code named “Cascade Lake-SP”. This new CPU family features up to 28 cores, 38.5 MB of last level caching and (6)

2933 MT/s DDR4 memory channels.

In order to show customers, the performance and energy efficiency uplifts possible from the new PowerEdge products,

Dell’s Solutions Performance Analysis team performed a series of benchmarks and compared the results to those

previously obtained from PowerEdge servers equipped with the previous generation “Skylake-SP” Xeon family.

Based on these results, PowerEdge servers with new Cascade Lake-SP family processors performed up to 63% better as

compared to their direct predecessors equipped with Skylake-SP family processors.

Key findings

Performance with Cascade Lake-SP

• Refreshed PowerEdge servers with two Xeon Platinum 8280 processors delivered 19% higher throughput

using the comprehensive SPECcpu2017 integer workload suite.

• Refreshed PowerEdge servers with two Xeon Platinum 8280 processors delivered 4.5% higher throughput

using the comprehensive SPECcpu2017 floating point workload suite.

• Refreshed PowerEdge servers with two Xeon Platinum 8280 processors produced 3.3 trillion double

precision floating point operations per second according to the popular LINPACK high performance

computing metric.

• Refreshed PowerEdge servers with two Xeon Platinum 8280 processors and a 2933 MT/s DDR4 memory

configuration exhibited 4% higher sustained memory bandwidth according to the STREAM benchmark.

• Refreshed PowerEdge servers with two Xeon Platinum 8280 processors demonstrated a 9% improved

overall energy efficiency over its Xeon Platinum 8180 processor predecessor.

• Refreshed PowerEdge servers with two Xeon Platinum 8280 processors demonstrated a 14% higher Java

transactional throughput than its Xeon Platinum 8180 processor predecessor.

• Refreshed PowerEdge servers with two Xeon Platinum 8280 processors achieved another SAP-SD two-

tier business transaction benchmark world record with its 11% higher score than with two Xeon Platinum

8180 processors.

Comparing the SPECcpu2017 integer rate score for the 2 x 4216 CPU configuration to the 2 x 4116 one (179 vs 110).