Discussion Just upgraded my old Haswell 2696-v3 to XEON Platinum 8136 with some interesting results.

[traderjay]

One of my old workstations with the XEON 2696-V3 is due for an upgrade and decided to try my luck and acquired an OEM XEON Platinum 8136 chip ($850) and the gamble paid off since this CPU is not officially supported in the retail channel. I ran some benchmarks such as cinebench R20 and got a score of 9600 points. The motherboard is X11SRL-F. Let me know what other benchmarks you guys want me to run to put this monster chip through its paces! Currently I only have 4 sticks of ECC DDR4 2166 RAM so the CPU is not running in six channel yet.

 

[ehume]

How many cores does the XEON Platinum 8136 chip at max?

 

[traderjay]

How many cores does the XEON Platinum 8136 chip at max?

28 cores and its very similar to the retail SKU XEON Platinum 8176

 

[Markfw]

I'll take my 32 cores for $1000, you got a good deal on the cpu, but the motherboard must have been $$$$

 

[DrMrLordX]

Y-cruncher! Or anything else AVX-512 aware.

edit: looks like someone is dumping these on eBay. One of Intel's ODM customers no doubt. From the sales listing:

Up for sale is a genuine Intel Xeon Platinum P-8136 CPU SR2YN. This data center customized OEM (not ES) processor has very similar specifications to the retail Xeon Platinum 8176 (SR37A), except for a maximum supported memory speed of 2400MHz.


This processor requires a BIOS microcode of B1 production stepping. Please review the following compatible / incompatible product lists before making the purchase.


Compatible Products:

• Intel: S2600WF/ST/BP family motherboards; S2600WF-based servers
• Tyan: S7100, S7105 motherboards; B7100, B7105, B7118 servers
• Supermicro: X11 LGA-3647 UP/DP/MP motherboards and SuperServers (all models except for X11DPL-i; modded BIOS with a microcode patch required*)

* Modded BIOS can be flashed in IPMI with a SFT-OOB-LIC license if a natively supported processor is not available.


Incompatible Products:

• Asus: Z11PA-U12, Z11PA-D8, Z11PR-D16, WS C621E SAGE motherboards
• ASRock: EPC621D8A and EP2C622 series motherboards
• Gigabyte: MD61-SC2, MD71-HB0 motherboards; LGA-3647 servers
• Tyan: S7103, S7106, S5630 motherboards; B7102, B7106, B7108, B7109, B7119, B5630, B5631 servers
• Dell: PowerEdge 14G servers; Precision T7820, T7920, R7920 workstations
• HP: ProLiant Gen10 servers; Z6, Z8 workstations
• Lenovo: ThinkSystem servers; ThinkStation P720, P920
• Fujitsu: PRIMERGY M4 servers
• Cisco: UCS M5 servers

Datacenter customized eh? One of Intel's bigger customers I guess?

 

[traderjay]

I'll take my 32 cores for $1000, you got a good deal on the cpu, but the motherboard must have been $$$$

Wow..I guess that's the threadripper right? USD$1000 is great price! The motherboard for my CPU costs USD$360 and its quite reasonable IMO.

Y-cruncher! Or anything else AVX-512 aware.

edit: looks like someone is dumping these on eBay. One of Intel's ODM customers no doubt. From the sales listing:



Datacenter customized eh? One of Intel's bigger customers I guess?

Yes that's where I got the CPU from and I bought from the seller a few times, very reliable and does next day Fedex shipping to Canada! I am getting three Xeon 8136 from that seller in total to replace my other dual socket XEON 2696 V4 system.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I wonder what undocumented features are in those chips?

 

[traderjay]

I wonder what undocumented features are in those chips?

Give me some tips/guidance and I'll try to find out for you. I am using the workstation primarily for video editing, adobe stuff and 3D machine vision processing such as point cloud analysis and feature extraction.

 

[crashtech]

Very interesting, thanks for posting! Hard to believe such a CPU would already be retiring, that might be the real story behind the story here.

 

[Zucker2k]

28 cores for $850. A xeon, no less. Crazy bargain indeed!

 

[DrMrLordX]

Give me some tips/guidance and I'll try to find out for you.

Honestly I have no idea where to start looking for that kind of information. It would depend on whoever is dumping the chips. Intel has been selling semi-custom Xeons on a per-customer basis since 2008 (I think). If you can find out who ordered those chips in the first place, then maybe you could find out what extra features were added at their behest.

 

[Zucker2k]

A combination of bios and hwinfo should be enough, I think.

 

[DrMrLordX]

@Zucker2k

Some of the semi-custom Xeons have unique instructions not present in "normal" Xeon silicon. I'm not sure how to ferret those out though.

 

[traderjay]

I will try ask the seller and see if he can provide me with the info. Next week (after Canada Day Long Weekend) I"ll run some additional benchmarks and post here.

 

[traderjay]

My geekbench sore - https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/13746796

Will re-run the test once I get my six channels up and running.