Balancing Power, Price, and Performance in the Server CPU World
by Johan De Gelas on March 3, 2011 7:07 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- AMD
- Intel
- 1000W
- Xeon
- Opteron
- Cloud Computing
SQL Server 2008
The Flemish/Dutch site Nieuws.be is a web 2.0 website launched in 2008. It gathers news from many different sources and allows the reader a personalized view on all the news. The Nieuws.be site sits on top of a large database—more than 100GB and growing. This database consists of a few hundred separate tables, which have been carefully optimized by our lab (the Sizing Server Lab). We use a log from their site for this test.
99% of the loads on the database are selects and about 5% of them are stored procedures. Network traffic is 6.5MB/s average and 14MB/s at the most, so our Gigabit connection still has a lot of headroom. Disk Queue Length (DQL) is at 2 in the first round of tests, but we only report the results of the next rounds where the database is in a steady state. We measured a DQL close to 0 during these tests, so there is no tangible impact from the hard disk speed.
Note: Starting with our twelve-core Opteron review, we are using a new heavier log. The Nieuws.be application has become more popular and more complex, the database has grown, and queries have become more complex too. The results are no longer comparable to previous results. They are similar, but much lower.
At first you might surprised that the Intel chips win here, as this was one of the benchmarks where AMD's high-end CPUs excel. But of course, we should not forget that the Magny-cours chips like the Opteron 6174 had twice as many cores as its Xeon competitors. The "Lisbon" CPU only has 50% more cores than its typical Xeon alternatives.
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pvdw - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Don't worry duploxxx, no company in their right mind would hire him. And those who do, deserve what they get for just hiring a zealot with little to no expertise.pvdw - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
He's just a mindless troll, let's ignore him.theangryintern - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
This is a bit OT, did I miss the full article about AnandTech's server upgrade, or has the story not been posted yet? I remember we got a couple preview articles, and now nothing for several months. I was really interested in seeing the full story of the upgrades.gujiong2002 - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
Typo?meorah - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - link
Its too bad the benchmarks didn't include comparisons to a mainstream processor like the E5620. That way we could get a sense of scale between all the low power processor performance/power usage levels.In other words, if the E5620 is only slightly worse than the low power processors, it makes the scale smaller so the differences between the low power processors are more pronounced, similar to the charts in the article.
However, if the E5620 is much worse than the low power procs, it makes the chart scale much higher and suddenly the relative difference between the low power procs seems almost insignificant.
I understand the concept of max density and therefore max performance/watt for datacenters, but there are plenty of small businesses with 1-4 racks in a corporate site computer closet running back-office systems who are also interested in balancing TCO on a smaller scale, and including a mainstream proc in your charts would help them (me). :)