Westmere-EX: Intel's Flagship Benchmarked

SAP S&D Benchmark

The SAP SD (sales and distribution, 2-tier internet configuration) benchmark is an interesting benchmark as it is a real world client-server application. We looked at SAP's benchmark database for these results. The results below all run on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition and MS SQL Server 2005 database (both 64-bit). Every 2-tier Sales & Distribution benchmark was performed with SAP's latest ERP 6 enhancement package 4. These results are NOT comparable with any benchmark performed before 2009. The new 2009 version of the benchmark produces scores that are 25% lower. We analyzed the SAP Benchmark in-depth in one of our earlier articles. The profile of the benchmark has remained the same:

• Very parallel resulting in excellent scaling
• Low to medium IPC, mostly due to "branchy" code
• Somewhat limited by memory bandwidth
• Likes large caches (memory latency!)
• Very sensitive to sync ("cache coherency") latency

There is no doubt here: the Westmere-EX Xeon delivers with 30% higher performance than the previous x86 quad CPU record. The 40-core, 80-thread quad Xeon server can not beat the 32-core, 128-thread IBM Power 750, the RISC champion; however, the high-end IBM servers start at $100,000, two to three times more than a comparable Xeon system.

The 30% extra performance that the new 32 nm Xeon delivers over its predecessor also increases the gap with AMD. The best quad Xeon now offers 50% more performance than the best quad Opteron. The ERP market is a market where RAS, scalability, and performance are the top priorities and hardware pricing is only a secondary thought. There is little doubt in our mind that Intel will continue to dominate the x86 ERP server market.