AMD Opteron vs. Intel Xeon: Database Performance Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on March 2, 2004 2:11 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Hyper Threading
Intel's Hyper Threading technology has been widely accepted in the enterprise and desktop markets, to the point where the vast majority of systems ship with Hyper Threading enabled and leave it that way.
Our tests have shown that Hyper Threading improved performance 3 - 5% on average and thus we left it enabled for all of our tests here.
The Tests
We ran two sets of tests for this comparison: an updated version of our own home-grown tests on the AnandTech Forums Database, as well as another more strenuous test representative of enterprise-class transactional database serving applications. We will discuss the two tests in greater detail in the coming pages, but first the basic hardware configuration for our tests:
AMD Opteron 848/248 and Intel Xeon/Xeon MP (Prestonia/Gallatin)
4GB DDR333 (NUMA was enabled for the opteron)
8 x 36GB 15,000RPM Ultra320 SCSI drives in RAID-0
Windows 2003 Enterprise Server
Days, and then weeks went by as we researched and regression-tested various benchmark methodologies in order to come up with fair, repeatable and, most of all, real world database benchmarks. In the past, we've used a trace playback methodology to stress the database. While it served its purpose for the hardware that was tested, it was time for a change. This time around, we wanted to have two different tests: one that represented an average database load, like the AnandTech Forums; and, the other that represented an enterprise level workload.
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Rand - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
perlgreen - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
Is there any chance that you guys could do more tests and benchmarking on Linux for IT Computing/Servers? I really like your site, but it'd be really nice if there would be more stuff for fans of the Penguin!cheers,
Campbell
ragusauce - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
#54We have been building from source and trying different options / debug versions...
DBBoy - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
#47 - In OLAP, or poorly indexed environments where the amount of data exceeds the 4 MB L3 cache of the Xeons the Opteron is going to shine even more with it's increased memory bandwidth.Assuming you do not bottleneck on the disk IO the SQL cache/RAM will be utilised much more thus putting more of a burden on the FSB of the Xeons in addition to allowing the Opteron's memory bandwidth to display it's abilities.
Jason Clark - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
ragusauce, using binaries or building from source?Cheers
ragusauce - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
We have been doing extensive testing of MySQL64 on Opteron and have had problems with seg faults as well.zarjad - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
Great, thanks.My thoughts:
In this type of application you are likely to use more than 4GB memory.
Memory bandwidth should matter because you will be doing a lot of full table scans (as opposed to using indexes).
Jason Clark - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
zarjad, I'll get back to you on that question I have some thoughts and amd discussing them with one of the guys that worked with us on the tests (Ross).zarjad - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
Jason, any comments on #47?Jason Clark - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
The os used was windows 2003 enterprise which does indeed support NUMA. So NUMA was enabled.. this was covered in an earlier response.