Intel's newest Quad Xeon MP versus HP's DL585 Quad Opteron
by Johan De Gelas on November 10, 2006 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Words of thanks
A lot of people gave us assistance with this project, and we would of course like to thank them.
Trevor E. Lawless, Intel US
Matty Bakkeren, Intel Netherlands
Markus Weingartner, Intel Germany
(www.intel.com)
Damon Muzny, AMD US
(www.amd.com)
Angela Rosario, Supermicro US
Michael Kalodrich, Supermicro US
Peter Yang, Supermicro US
(http://www.supermicro.com)
Peter Zaitsev, Elite MySQL Guru
(www.mysql.com)
Bob Cramblitt and Larry D. Gray
(www.spec.org)
Brecht Kets, MySQL patching and tuning
Pieter Beel, SPECjbb benchmarking
Anja Gheldof, MySQL benchmarking
Tijl Deneut, Linux support
Benchmark configuration
In case you're wondering why we chose to use the fastest Xeon DP, the second fastest Xeon MP, and the second fastest Opteron, the reason is simple: those were the CPUs that were made available to us. As always, both AMD and Intel were contacted for this test. If a manufacturer has questions about any of our benchmarks, it is discussed and if necessary the manufacturer is allowed to login to our servers and monitor our benchmarking. This allows us to use our own benchmarks and not only industry standard benchmarks, which easily fall victim of "extreme" and in some cases "non-realistic" tuning....
Hardware configurations
Here is the list of the different configurations:
Xeon Server 1: Dual Xeon DP Supermicro SS6015b-8+
Dual Xeon DP 5160 3 GHz
Intel 5000P chipset
Supermicro's X7DBR-8+
8GB (8x1024 MB) Micron FB - DIMM Registered DDR-II 533 MHz CAS 4, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Xeon Server 2: Quad Xeon MP Intel SR6850HW4
Quad Xeon MP 7130M 3.2 GHz 8MB L3
Intel 8501 chipset
16GB (8x2048 MB) Micron Registered DDR-II PC2-3200R, 400 MHz CAS 3, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Opteron Server 1: Quad Opteron HP DL585
Quad Opteron 880 2.4 GHz
AMD8000 Chipset
16GB (16x1048 MB) Crucial DDR333 CAS 2.5, ECC enabled
NIC: NC7782 Dual PCI-X Gigabit
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Client Configuration: Dual Opteron 850
Dual Opteron 850 1.8 GHz
MSI K8T Master1-FAR
4x512 MB Infineon PC2700 Registered, ECC
NIC: Broadcom 5705
Software
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server Edition (2.6.15-26-amd64-server SMP)
MySQL 5.0.26 with Peter Zaitsev Mutex Patch
SPECjbb2005
Sun Hotspot Java JVM 1.5.0_08
A lot of people gave us assistance with this project, and we would of course like to thank them.
Trevor E. Lawless, Intel US
Matty Bakkeren, Intel Netherlands
Markus Weingartner, Intel Germany
(www.intel.com)
Damon Muzny, AMD US
(www.amd.com)
Angela Rosario, Supermicro US
Michael Kalodrich, Supermicro US
Peter Yang, Supermicro US
(http://www.supermicro.com)
Peter Zaitsev, Elite MySQL Guru
(www.mysql.com)
Bob Cramblitt and Larry D. Gray
(www.spec.org)
Brecht Kets, MySQL patching and tuning
Pieter Beel, SPECjbb benchmarking
Anja Gheldof, MySQL benchmarking
Tijl Deneut, Linux support
Benchmark configuration
In case you're wondering why we chose to use the fastest Xeon DP, the second fastest Xeon MP, and the second fastest Opteron, the reason is simple: those were the CPUs that were made available to us. As always, both AMD and Intel were contacted for this test. If a manufacturer has questions about any of our benchmarks, it is discussed and if necessary the manufacturer is allowed to login to our servers and monitor our benchmarking. This allows us to use our own benchmarks and not only industry standard benchmarks, which easily fall victim of "extreme" and in some cases "non-realistic" tuning....
Hardware configurations
Here is the list of the different configurations:
Xeon Server 1: Dual Xeon DP Supermicro SS6015b-8+
Dual Xeon DP 5160 3 GHz
Intel 5000P chipset
Supermicro's X7DBR-8+
8GB (8x1024 MB) Micron FB - DIMM Registered DDR-II 533 MHz CAS 4, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Xeon Server 2: Quad Xeon MP Intel SR6850HW4
Quad Xeon MP 7130M 3.2 GHz 8MB L3
Intel 8501 chipset
16GB (8x2048 MB) Micron Registered DDR-II PC2-3200R, 400 MHz CAS 3, ECC enabled
NIC: Dual Intel PRO/1000 Server NIC
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Opteron Server 1: Quad Opteron HP DL585
Quad Opteron 880 2.4 GHz
AMD8000 Chipset
16GB (16x1048 MB) Crucial DDR333 CAS 2.5, ECC enabled
NIC: NC7782 Dual PCI-X Gigabit
2 Seagate Cheetah 73GB - 15000 rpm - SCSI 320 MB/s
Client Configuration: Dual Opteron 850
Dual Opteron 850 1.8 GHz
MSI K8T Master1-FAR
4x512 MB Infineon PC2700 Registered, ECC
NIC: Broadcom 5705
Software
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server Edition (2.6.15-26-amd64-server SMP)
MySQL 5.0.26 with Peter Zaitsev Mutex Patch
SPECjbb2005
Sun Hotspot Java JVM 1.5.0_08
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88 Comments
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JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
Well, we did mentione it at our price comparison. From a performance point of view, the G2 is within 2% of the DL585 given a similar configuration.Getting a server in the lab is not like getting a videochip for review. The machines are much more expensive, and you need much more time to review them properly. So OEMs are less likely to send you the necessary hardware. For a videocard they send out a $500 item that can be reviewed in a few weeks, maybe even a few days. For Server like these, they have to send out a $20000 machine and be able to miss it for a month or two at the least.
Viditor - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
I can certainly understand and empathise with the situation...and I did enjoy the article, Johan!
The reason I mentioned it is that line in your conclusion...
I thought that (considering the circumstances) it was a bit unfair and misleading...
JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 11, 2006 - link
I just pointed out that it is a bit weird that a newer revision of the DL585 (it was thé HP Opteron machine just a few months ago) used SCSI 160. There is no reason at all why HP could not replace this: they revised the server anyway.I should mentioned that these results were solved in the G2, but still it is a missed chance... eventhough I reported it a bit too late :-)
photoguy99 - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
yes, bring it on!finalfan - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
On page The Official SPEC Numbers, in second table SPEC FP 2000 Performance, the positions of (4/8) HP Opteron AM2 and (8/8) Hitachi Itanium 2 should be switched. No Itanium runs at 3.4G and no way a 4way 1.6G AM2 can sit in second place.JohanAnandtech - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
Corrected. It is weird, the accurate numbers were in the orginal document. The generation of the table went wrong. I have double checked and now the FP numbers should all be accurateJarredWalton - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
Probably my fault. I think when it got put into Excel that the various x/y numbers were converted to dates. I thought I fixed all of those, but probably missed one or two. Sorry.icarus4586 - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
This report brought to you by the department of redundancy department.
bwmccann - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
When are you guys going to start benchmarking server CPUs using applications that are widely used in organizations on a daily basis?Most companies have a very high percentage of servers running Windows. With that I would love to see some test on SQL, Oracle, Exchange, and other core components of enterprises today.
Also it would be nice to see a closer comparison of the servers. For example you tested a DL585. A DL580 (Intel Woodcrest) would have been better suited since some of the components would be the same.
JohanAnandtech - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2793">http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2793Most of the time Jason does the Windows benchmarking, me and my team do the Linux benchmarking.
Java, MySQL and SSL are also core components of many enterprise apps.
We are working on Oracle and got access to a realworld Oracle database a few weeks ago (for the first time), but it takes time to really understand what your benchmark is telling you and how you must configure your db. And Oracle is ...very stubborn, even patching to a slightly higher version can lead to big trouble.
The DL585 is a direct competitor (quad socket) in this space, more so than the DL580 (DUal Socket)