Intel Pentium Silver J5005 Benchmarks and Review

Intel Pentium Silver J5005 Benchmarks

For this exercise, we are using our legacy Linux-Bench scripts which help us see cross-platform “least common denominator” results we have been using for years as well as several results from our updated Linux-Bench2 scripts. At this point, our benchmarking sessions take days to run and we are generating well over a thousand data points. We are also running workloads for software companies that want to see how their software works on the latest hardware. As a result, this is a small sample of the data we are collecting and can share publicly. Our position is always that we are happy to provide some free data but we also have services to let companies run their own workloads in our lab, such as with our DemoEval service. What we do provide is an extremely controlled environment where we know every step is exactly the same and each run is done in a real-world data center, not a test bench.

We are going to show off a few results, and highlight a number of interesting data points in this article.

Python Linux 4.4.2 Kernel Compile Benchmark

This is one of the most requested benchmarks for STH over the past few years. The task was simple, we have a standard configuration file, the Linux 4.4.2 kernel from kernel.org, and make the standard auto-generated configuration utilizing every thread in the system. We are expressing results in terms of compiles per hour to make the results easier to read:

Here we can see solid performance just above what we saw with the original Goldmont architecture represented by the Intel Atom C3558. The Intel Atom C3558 suffers from a maximum clock speed of 2.2GHz in comparison to the maximum clock on the Intel Pentium Silver J5005 of 2.8GHz.

c-ray 1.1 Performance

We have been using c-ray for our performance testing for years now. It is a ray tracing benchmark that is extremely popular to show differences in processors under multi-threaded workloads. We are going to use our 4K results which work well at this end of the performance spectrum.

Here you can see that the four core Intel Pentium Silver J5005 performs well against the eight core Intel Atom C2758. That shows just how much advancement the Intel Atom team is making. The Atom C2758 had a more robust feature set with items like QAT and multiple MACs. At the same time, the Atom C2758 had twice the TDP at 20W.

7-zip Compression Performance

7-zip is a widely used compression/ decompression program that works cross-platform. We started using the program during our early days with Windows testing. It is now part of Linux-Bench.

Here we have some absolutely great performance. We wanted to point out that the performance is about on par with the AMD Opteron X3421 in this case and many others. The AMD Opteron X3421 has features such as more PCIe 3.0 lanes, but these products are somewhat competitive.

NAMD Performance

NAMD is a molecular modeling benchmark developed by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. More information on the benchmark can be found here. Here are the comparison results for the legacy data set:

We normally augment this with our GROMACS workload, however, we are going to skip that in this review. With GROMACS we support AVX-512 and AVX2 but these chips are not targeted at this kind of workload. The Pentium Silver J5005 here falls just between the Pentium D1508 (2C/4T) and Atom C2758 (8C) parts.

Sysbench CPU test

Sysbench is another one of those widely used Linux benchmarks. We specifically are using the CPU test, not the OLTP test that we use for some storage testing.

This is another great result which is helped by the benchmark size and the higher clock speed of the Intel Pentium J5005.

OpenSSL Performance

OpenSSL is widely used to secure communications between servers. This is an important protocol in many server stacks. We first look at our sign tests:

And the verify results:

As you can see, the overall performance is very good for a 10W TDP part. Cutting a lot of the I/O from the platform yields TDP dividends which in turn helps CPU performance.

UnixBench Dhrystone 2 and Whetstone Benchmarks

Some of the longest-running tests at STH are the venerable UnixBench 5.1.3 Dhrystone 2 and Whetstone results. They are certainly aging, however, we constantly get requests for them, and many angry notes when we leave them out. UnixBench is widely used so we are including it in this data set. Here are the Dhrystone 2 results:

Here are the whetstone numbers:

Overall, these are good results. We see performance just above the AMD Opteron X3421 which is a welcome result.

Chess Benchmarking

Chess is an interesting use case since it has almost unlimited complexity. Over the years, we have received a number of requests to bring back chess benchmarking. We have been profiling systems and are ready to start sharing results:

Here we wanted to point out that as good as the Intel Pentium Silver J5005 is, the $161 price tag is steep. In comparison, the Intel Core i3-8100 is less expensive and offers significantly more performance. There is a premium for going fanless with a low TDP.

Next, we are going to have the power consumption, market positioning, and our final words.