What Does It Mean To Be Faster?

As humans, we always strive to do things better, to push ourselves just a little bit further. The drive to move forward is even more pervasive in business. Bigger, better, faster is the rally cry for innovation, and engineers are tasked with doing all that they can to push product designs to the next level.

Simulation has become a key enabler for engineering groups to head down this path to more innovative design. The ability to test drive ideas using simulation tools in a virtual world allows teams to explore a greater number of design concepts and identify flaws earlier on the cycle when is far less costly to make changes.

Yet a successful simulation strategy hinges on having a hardware platform optimized to deliver results. If engineers find themselves limited by the size or the number of models they can simulate or lack the horsepower to test out designs in a realistic virtual setting, they are compromised by what today’s simulation software can offer. What is the point of running a robust simulation problem if it ties up a workstation for hours or days on end, taking an engineer offline, unable to work. If simulation becomes the bottleneck for productivity, engineers will be less inclined to conduct extensive investigative studies simply because they can’t afford to miss a project deadline or disrupt aggressive time-to-market cycles.

Accelerate Innovation

But what if the workstation is no longer the drag on the design cycle, but rather the enabler, boosting simulation performance by a factor of nearly 3x and improving overall engineering productivity? The Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600v3 product family, a new line of workstation processors optimized for the highest performance and maximum memory support, does just that, empowering engineers to accelerate discovery and improve innovation throughput.

With support for two processors, up to eight memory channels, over 1TB of memory, and two Intel QuickPath Interconnect buses, workstations based on the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600v3 product family move data faster for processor-intensive simulation, rendering, and ray-tracing tasks. The ability to move data faster means simulations run faster—in some cases, up to a 3.7x performance boost compared to comparable analyses running on a four-year old machine powered by an Intel® Xeon® Processor X5690.

The added horsepower of an Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600v3 workstation has other benefits over its four-year-old predecessor. Engineers can move beyond using simulations for single-point predictions to stochastic modeling, a practice of automating systematic, rapid changes to help determine system performance throughout a product’s lifecycle. With this approach, which has traditionally required high performance computer (HPC) processing, an engineer rapidly iterates designs to determine how changes like curved corners or a reduction in material will aid in achieving key design goals, like minimizing weight, for example, or withstanding certain temperature ranges.

Four-Year-Old Workstation Refresh Yields Up To 6.2x. Performance Boost Performance Summary: Xeon® E5-2699 v3 vs X5690

The Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600v3 product family ups the ante significantly, especially for simulation experts and power users. While they may have been able to get by with older workstation technology, it hasn’t been without constraints on their design capabilities. Upgrading to a workstation optimized to speed up simulation practices removes any limitations and lets them kick design innovation up a notch.

For more information on the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 product family, go to www.intel.com/workstation.