Its unfortunate they didn't give an more details on the per year costs in colo. I'm pretty interested in that metric as well and how it compares to the other intel xeon chips.
Colo cost varies based on the facility, uplink, power density, and various other factors. So it doesn't quite make sense to talk about the "colo cost" of a specific device, or comparing colo cost of one chip versus another... unless what you're really just comparing is power efficiency.
Let's say you're renting half a rack with 100Mbps unmetered bandwidth and 20amps of 120V for $500 per month. So you have 16 amps / 1920 watts of continuous power you can draw. These Xeon D's are very lower power, although strangely Pat doesn't report the actual idle and full load draw as measured by a Kill-o-Watt meter. With the 10GBE I can't imagine budgeting much less than 150 watts per machine. If you can put let's say a dozen of these in that half rack, in my contrived example, the "colo cost" would be $41.66 / month or just $2.60 / core.
Hi zaroth - We do not use Kill-o-Watt meters since we use calibrated Extech TrueRMS units for our "desktop" testing.
We also have a few racks in Sunnyvale, California that we use APC metered by outlet PDUs for and that we actually calibrated by testing with the Extech units and found two of over a dozen that gave us consistent readings across PDUs and ports.
This unit is in a SC515 chassis with redundant PSUs. Even with 4x 7200 rpm Seagate 2.5" drives, a 64GB mSATA drive and a Samsung SM951 m.2 SSD it is still pulling 0.24A on 208V (so 0.48A on 208V). If you were to gain a bit of efficiency running a single PSU, you could easily fit these in 1A on 120V power envelope.
What we have seen several folks do with similar D-1540 machines is actually use 1U 1A/ 120V hosting (which is very inexpensive) to deliver cheap local PoPs for their applications. We have been strongly considering decommissioning our Las Vegas 1/2 cab DR site and moving to this sort of distributed model as there are a lot of benefits with this.
We published more complete benchmark results ( http://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-d-1587-benchmarks-16-... )of the D-1587 yesterday, expect more in terms of reviewing the overall platform next week. The Xeon D is very platform dependent for power and the particular unit we have does have the additional LSI/ Avago/ Broadcom SAS 2116 (16 port SAS2) HBA onboard.
Thanks Pat! Long-time reader of STH, I really find your articles incredibly useful and informative!
I assume you meant to write "(so .48A on 120V)". 50W idle with 4 spinning drives, an M.2, and the redundant PSU really is really very impressive. As you say, keeping full load under 120 watts to be able to fit in a 1U/1amp colo gives an incredible value.
The hardware's not even that expensive! And for $50 - $60 / month in colo cost [1], the reliability of systems now with SSDs, and the amazing orchestration tools that are available, the likes of AWS, DigitalOcean, etc. start to look really expensive.
Awesome! Great to hear. You got me on the typo. Should have been 0.24A per PSU (we meter by outlet on multi-outlet systems). Still 1A on 120V in a 1U is very easy to achieve.
Across all the SKUs in OP the TDP is 35-65 watts. 20 More watts for the new 1587 SKU compared to the benchmarked 1540 in the anandtech article. So a rough estimate would be maybe ~95 watts at under load? Assuming the board is the same and only the CPU has changed that should be a pretty good estimate.
You're right it mostly doesn't make sense to compare machines in that way due to all of the variables surrounding colo costs, max load wattage is the metric I should be interested in.
