The Intel Xeon E5 v3 Haswell EP processors are here. The floating point performance on these new processors is outstanding. We run a Linpack benchmark on a dual Xeon E5-2687W v3 system and show how it stacks up against several processors.
Memory Performance for Intel Xeon Haswell-EP DDR4
Memory bandwidth is often an important factor for compute or data intensive workloads. The STREAM benchmark has been used for may years as a measure of this bandwidth. We present STREAM results for the new Xeon E5 v3 Haswell processor with DDR4 memory and compare this with an Xeon E5 v2 Ivy Bridge system.
Linpack performance Haswell E (Core i7 5960X and 5930K)
The new Intel desktop Core i7 processors are out, Haswell E! We look at how the Core i7 5960X and 5930K stack up with some other processors for numerical computing with the Intel optimized MKL Linpack benchmark.
Tech Primer: DDR4 RAM
DDR3 is almost seven years old, but is finally starting to be replaced with the new DDR4 memory. Featuring lower operating voltages, higher frequencies, and increased storage densities DDR4 is shaping up to be a very capable successor to the aging DDR3.
Core i7 5960X vs. 4960X Performance Comparison
Typically, a new CPUs is faster than it’s predecessor – it is just a question of whether is it by a little or a lot. The new Intel 5960X, however, is not typical because it sacrifices clock speed in order to add more cores. In this article we want to run a wide variety of benchmarks to find out what applications benefit from the additional cores and which suffer from the drop in clock speed.
X79 vs X99: What is new in X99 and Haswell-E
The X99 chipset is a major improvement over X79 adding native USB 3.0 support, more SATA 6Gb/s ports, DDR4 support, and plenty of other little updates. Haswell-E also adds a lot of improvements, but has an overall drop in core frequency that makes it not as clearly better than Ivy Bridge-E.
LAMMPS Optimized for Intel on Quad Socket Xeon
LAMMPS is a molecular dynamics program capable of running very large (billions of atom) dynamics simulations. It is modular with many contributed packages to add extra potential energy functions, atom types etc.. There was recently added a package, USER-INTEL, that adds some nice code optimizations for Intel Xeon hardware. We grabbed the latest source code and did a build with this new code and fired it up on our quad Xeon test system and got very good performance.
Changing Priorities
I’d never used a Dremel before.
But I’d have to learn if I wanted a PC that stood out from all the nondescript beige boxes my friends owned. So I spent the afternoon tracing the pattern on side panel of my Lian-Li aluminum case using a stencil I’d found online. Had YouTube been around at the time, I would have searched to find a Dremel tutorial but it would be few more years before it existed.
Overview of M.2 SSDs
M.2 is a new form of connectivity that allows a SSD to connect directly to the PCI-E bus allowing for theoretical speeds as high as 2GB/s. However, M.2 drives are complicated in that they allow for a variety of physical dimensions, connectors, and even multiple logical interfaces. To help our customers understand the nuances of M.2 drives, we decided to publish this overview of M.2 SSDs.
Start Guide: Switching from Mac to Windows
We’ve been hearing from a regular stream of customers who are making the move from Mac OS X to Windows, and they often have questions about how to perform basic tasks on their new Puget Systems PC running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. So we created this Start Guide to help them around their new desktop.
