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November 2017

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www.postmagazine.com 21 POST NOVEMBER 2017 WORKSTATIONS & PROCESSORS platform that is specifically designed for them. The platform includes supporting chips to pro- vide USB 3.1 type A to C, Thunderbolt 3, gigabit Ethernet, SATA and other ports. In the case of the Skylake platform, the sup- porting chip for the Intel Xeon Scalable processor is known as the Lewisberg PCH, and for the Intel Xeon W processor, it is the Kaby Lake WS PCH. It can get confusing at times because various people use the different names interchangeably. It gets even more complicated because the pro- cessor, supporting chip and platform all have ar- cane part numbers too, which among other things denote frequency, core count and other esoteric elements. And, just to make you even crazier, things are expressed in acronyms. HOW FAR WE'VE COME Recently, Intel launched two new Intel Xeon processors. The E5-1600 Product Family pro- cessor is now the new Intel Xeon W proces- sor (single-socket); this is the first product designed with a "W" for workstations in the product name. The other, the E5-2600 Product Family processor, is now the new Intel Xeon Scalable processors (dual-socket). We've come a long way from that first Windows-Intel based workstation in 1997. It came with a 266 MHz Pentium II pro- cessor and could, on a good day, hit 48.3 MFLOPS. The top-of-the-line worksta- tions of the day had a 300 MHz Intel Pentium II processor that could deliver 62.1 MFLOPS. By comparison, in June 1997, the fastest supercomputer in the world was the ACSI RED at the Sandia National Laboratory, US Nuclear Arsenal, and it could do 1.3 TFLOPS. It took up 1,600 square feet, filled with 104 racks that held 9,298 CPUs, 1.2TB RAM, needed 850 kilowatt of power and cost $46 million ($67 million today). Now, you can have a supercomputer small enough to sit under your desk that beats it. For example, Dell just announced the Precision 7920 Tower with dual Intel Xeon Platinum processors, each with up to 28 physical cores, running up to 3.8 GHz Turbo frequency capable of 4TFLOPS and 112 threads. Four times faster than the fastest supercomputer just 20 years ago for less than one ten-thousandth the cost, and uses less than one-thousandth the power. Not only that, almost anyone can use it; conversely, very few people could use that magnificent ACSI-RED — which, by the way, is still working, giving the U.S. taxpayers a pretty good ROI. WHAT COULD YOU DO WITH SUCH A MACHINE? We made a comparison of professional work- station workloads. Compared to a four-year-old E5-1680v2, 3.9 GHz-based workstation, the new Skylake-based Xeon W provides an average of 87 percent more performance. An 87 percent improvement in performance would be fine if all you wanted to do was render faster, or maybe load files faster, but the real payoff comes in being able to do what you couldn't do before. Famous computer graphics scientist Jim Blinn has an adage: "As technology advances, ren- dering time remains constant." The point being, artists and directors, for example, aren't trying to reduce the time to produce a movie (although their bosses tell them that should be their goal), but rather, they want to make the most beauti- ful movie they can. The same is true for engi- neers who are running simulations on ever more complex parts. Each time Intel raises the perfor- mance and the number of threads that can be processed simultaneously, sim users celebrate. Why? Because they can make their model more fine-grained. Finer granularity in an FEA simu- lation makes for a more reliable, more efficient and fine-tuned final product. Consider what that means when designing an airplane wing strut: A lighter and stronger airplane that is not only more durable, but also more fuel-efficient. THE AGE OF THREADS It's taken a long time, but the benefit of parallel processing is undeniable — performing processes simultaneously provides huge gains in productivi- ty and accuracy. The problem has been the legacy apps that simply couldn't be threaded and recom- piled. Slowly, the industry has built new apps with Dell's Precision 7920 Tower with dual Intel Xeon Platinum processors. Intel's recent Xeon scalable processor.

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