Intel Xeon 5500 series review

Virtual enhancements

Support for server virtualisation is end-to-end as you have Intel's VT-x and VPID (virtual processor ID) in the processors and these have been augmented with improvements to the EPTs (extended page tables). Combined together these are capable of increasing VM performance and reducing latency for VM transitions.

Implemented in the new Tylersburg chipset, VT-d (directed IO) supports DMA and device generated interrupt protection and remapping. The VT-c (connectivity) suite is aimed at end devices such as compliant 10GbE network adapters and includes VMDq (Virtual Machines Device Queue) which optimises networking performance for VMs.

Memory changes

More changes are evident in the memory department as the 5500 series only supports DDR3 memory, with speeds currently topping out at 1,333MHz. Performance improvements can be had by installing them in packs of three per DIMM bank for triple-channel access, but you don't have to.

You can choose between RDIMMS (registered) or UDIMMs (unregistered) but FBDIMMs aren't supported. RDIMMs support three DIMMs per channel whereas the cheaper UDIMMs only support two per channel but are more cost-effective where you're not planning on using more than 4GB in a server.

Choosing a 5500 Xeon

When picking your new processors choose carefully as there are significant differences across the 5500 family. It starts with four entry-level models with the dual-core E5502 having a 4MB L3 cache, supporting 800MHz memory speeds, a QPI speed of 4.8GT/sec and not implementing Turbo Boost or HyperThreading. The other three are quad-core but also have the same specifications.

Starting with the 2.26GHz L5520 and E5520, the next group of four processors support memory speeds up to 1,066MHz, have a QPI speed of 5.86GT/sec and implement Turbo Boost and HyperThreading.

The X5500 models offer all available features along with a QPI speed of 6.4GT/sec and supported memory speeds up to 1,333MHz.

Benchmark results

To give a guide to each version of the new Xeons, we benchmarked them in FlamMap, POV-Ray and CineBench.

Note that though the graphs below name the processors, they were in different rigs and thus used different amounts of memory. This information is shown at the foot of each graph.

FlamMap is a fire behaviour mapping and analysis program that computes potential fire behaviour. It demonstrates the benefits of multi-core technology and is very compute intensive, with a heavy number of floating point operations.

The 200MHz advantage of the X5560 over the X5550 results in a speed increase of almost 10%, and it's a good 80% quicker than the E5506 (though this was in a test rig with 8GB of 800MHz DDR3 RAM to the 24GB of 1,066MHz DDR3 RAM available to the X5560 and X5560).

CineBench is a dedicated benchmark based on the 3D software Cinema 4D. It performs CPU-intensive rendering operations using either a single CPU or multiple CPUs - the results here are based on multiple CPUs.