 Xeon W. Xeon Scalable. You know, they're both called Xeon, but these things are really different. One of them is basically a Core i9 with ECC memory support, and the other one is a server CPU that I fangirled all over, because I love super high-end, expensive Taktwits. Now, in the past, you needed multiple CPUs in one multi-socketed motherboard in order to handle intensive, multi-threaded workloads, but is that still the case today? Do you still need two of these, given that a single Xeon Platinum 8180 is 28 cores and 56 threads on a single chip? Well, I don't know. What is the purpose today of a dual-socket machine like this one, and how much have single, high-core count CPUs eroded the market that they used to enjoy? Let's find out, shall we? All right, there's a lot more room down here, and we are gonna need it for this honking, not to mention heavy test bench. On this test bench, you will find the ASUS C621E Sage. This is a dual-socket motherboard rocking two LGA3647 sockets for Intel's Xeon scalable lineup of CPUs. And setups like this have actually been around as far back as the 486 in 1989, with the resulting secondhand hardware giving enthusiasts the ability to get multiple physical cores in their homes over the years, with the peak being somewhere in the mid-2000s or so. But that was then, and this is now. Now you can get multiple processing cores in a single chip. So to see how far things have come, what we're gonna do is pit this machine against the fastest single CPU that we've tested to date. We're gonna try to keep the number of variables to a minimum in order to gauge the impact that these extra CPU cores will have on our setup. Though it should be noted that there aren't many options when it comes to aftermarket LGA3647 coolers, because most of the folks selling these kinds of systems would figure out their own solution. So that means that our dual socket workstation will run a little bit toasty, but we didn't observe any thermal throttling, so it shouldn't affect our performance. Let's start off then with good old fashioned Cinebench. I mean, we've seen this run before, but it's always fun to see it finish that quickly. Whoa! So in a surprise to no one, the dual socket machine is faster. But considering its 56 processing cores, not all of our workloads scale in the way that we might expect. 7-Zip, for example, shows a smaller than expected gain over our Core i9 Extreme Edition, and Y-Cruncher even finds itself losing ground. ASUS RealBench demonstrates this, though with that said, the encoding benchmark ekes out a lead over our Core i9-7980XE, and then Blender, well, here we actually get a victory for our dual CPU system again, showing this platform's potential for expanding render farms. But what is really going on here? Well, something you guys have to realize is that there is more to a dual socket configuration than just more cores. Do you remember when AMD managed a 3% improvement in IPC with second gen Ryzen just by improving cache latency? So on this motherboard, we've got two separate CPUs with two separate sets of cache and memory. See, these six banks go to this one, and these six banks are wired into this one, and that means a lot of latency for compute tasks that require the same data sets. This latency is a necessary evil in the design of multiprocessor systems because of the need for non-uniform memory access, or NUMA for short, that allows these two processors to efficiently share resources, or as efficiently as they can. So the short version of this is that it works by transparently allocating devices and memory to each CPU, which means they can more easily avoid interrupting each other while accessing those resources. This in turn reduces the amount of waiting around that they have to do for those resources to become available. So that's what we're seeing during our testing, like in Y-Crusher, for example, where both CPUs are working on the same data, but it's not really the intended use case for this kind of thing. What if we could use different data sets? Then we should be able to find this kind of setups true calling, and how better to do that than to effectively turn this system into two independent computing machines using virtualization. So let's fire up Onrade, which uses Red Hat KVM as a hypervisor to see what kind of results we get splitting these resources into multiple independent machines. Immediately, we see worse results from our VMs than our original 56 core testing. But look closely at how much lower it is. It's not a whole lot. In every test, it's basically the same story here, and we are still way out ahead of the Core i9 Extreme Edition, particularly when it comes to Blender. Now, if we consider the fact that we are getting simultaneous work done, that gives us a good look at what an optimized workload might look like. I mean, or heck, virtualization itself is a legitimate task too. I mean, this thing could be so many gamers in one PC. But I digress. I mean, nobody is gonna buy something like this for their personal rig anytime soon, given the $10,000 per CPU price tag, which puts it squarely in the territory of big, the size of the check doesn't matter business. What they care about is density. The more processing power a single computer can manage, the more processing power that can be physically fit into a building. And this is perhaps most important for data centers and render farms in particular. The less those guys have to spend on setting up the electricity and cooling management for a data center versus the amount of performance they can get, the better. So will multiple sockets make a comeback in the prosumer space? Outside of oil and gas exploration where there are still workloads that can benefit from this kind of thing, the chances look pretty slim if you ask me. But I don't necessarily think that it's Intel's intent to sell these chips in the prosumer space. And for that matter, even in the enterprise space, I don't think they move a ton of them. For me, I look at a product like this as more of like a future crafting exercise where it is available today, but it's more of a representation of what actually might be attainable a generation or two from now, just like the 22 core processors that we were playing around with a couple of years ago. Nowadays, those are much more affordable and businesses are using them to power your cloud computing services. So thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. Now I'm off to finally put this to use for the reason that I obtained it. Many video editors, one CPU.