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Integrated GPU on E3-12x5, what's the point?
Caveman122
Member
in General
As titled, what is the point of having integrated GPU on E3? What kind of application on a server would require GPU? OVH deploys E3-1225v2 and E31245v2 on a massive scale, surely these more expansive CPUs are justified over their non-GPU counter parts. (1220, 1240) For people who can afford to use E3 in their workstations, do they really care or going to use an integrated GPU?
Comments
A powerful GPU is not needed, but still some sort of GPU is needed - to have a monitor and be able to enter the BIOS for example. Of course the more expensive motherboards with IPMI have a separate GPU chip so they don't need the built-in GPU.
It was my understanding that most if not all motherboard (IPMI or otherwise) would come with a very basic iGPU if a port is provided.
No, not these days. Before the GPU was in the chipset. Now the chipset has no GPU, the GPU is in the CPU. So most motherboards don't have any GPU at all. So you either have to use a CPU with built in GPU, or an external video card (GPU).
Fair enough, would you mind giving me a example of a motherboard without some sort of basic iGPU? I couldn't find any, it seems like horrible design not to have any iGPU at all.
@Caveman122 just see any non-server (non-IPMI) motherboard - they don't have built in GPU. They have VGA and HDMI connectors, but these connectors are powered by the GPU inside the CPU.
This talk is about servers. At servers there are usually motherboards with IPMI, and so with on-motherboard GPU.
@Profforg you can build a server with cheap non-server $50 motherboad and a Xeon e3-1225 v3 CPU, for instance. OVH does this.
At SoYouStart and Kimsufi there are no need for IPMI in most of cases because of cool build-in features like Rescue System and Boot with default kernel.
With other providers, servers without IPMI is self-kill.
That's a good point, that's probably why SYS had all 12x5 CPUs.
@Caveman122 exactly. And you can check what motherboard they use with dmidecode - i bet it's some $50 or less motherboard.
Yep, H87 on my first server, however, I lucked out and got a C224 w/ ECC RAMs on my second server.
Intel unified their server and desktop CPU lines a few years back. Both have the same architecture. That is why there is a IGP on the server chip too. I guess intel enjoys greater economies of scale this way.
The Xeon E3 P4600/4700 GPU is officially certified for most Autodesk applications, such as Inventor 2015. This saved us several thousand euros, compared to the previous mandatory Quadro or FireGL GPU (we bought 30+ workstations this year). Inventor is almost entirely monothreaded; a E5 multi core processor does not bring enough benefits. The performance of the Intel Xeon E3 integrated GPU is satisfactory for this application. It is not a lightweight use: after loading one of our 3D drawing, the Inventor process is tipically using 15-20 Gb Ram. The stability is even better than the nVidia Quadro (less application crashes). It is certainly faster and more stable than the Quadro FX1800 we used previously.