The Intel Xeon 5670: Six Improved Cores
by Johan De Gelas on March 16, 2010 3:39 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Decision Support benchmark: Nieuws.be
| Decision Support benchmark Nieuws.be | |
| Operating System | Windows 2008 Enterprise RTM (64 bit) |
| Software | SQL Server 2008 Enterprise x64 (64 bit) |
| Benchmark software | vApus + real-world "Nieuws.be" Database |
| Database Size | > 100GB |
| Typical error margin | 1-2% |
The Flemish/Dutch Nieuws.be site is one of the newest web 2.0 websites, launched in 2008. It gathers news from many different sources and allows the reader to completely personalize his view on all this news. Needles to say, the Nieuws.be site is sitting of top of a pretty large database, more than 100 GB and growing. This database consists of a few hundred separate tables, which have been carefully optimized by our lab (the Sizing Server Lab).
Nieuws.be was so kind to let us test the MS SQL 2008 database for CPU benchmarking. We used a log taken between 10 and 11 AM, when traffic is at its peak. VAPUS, the stress testing software developed by the Sizing Server Lab, analyzes this log and simulates real users by performing the actions they performed on the website. In this case we used the resulting load on the database for our test. 99% of the load on the database are selects, about 5% of them are stored procedures. Network traffic is 6.5 MB/s average and 14 MB/s at the most. So our 1 gigabit connection has still 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 subsequent rounds where the database is in a steady state. We measured a DQL close to 0 during these tests, so there is no tangible intervention of the harddisks. This test is as real world as it gets! All servers were tested in a dual CPU configuration.
The Dual Xeon X5670 is not scaling so well here, as 50% more cores only result in 20% higher performance. Still, until the newest AMD Opterons arrive, there is not any competition for the six-core Xeon. It outperforms the nearest competitor by 40%.
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behrouz - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
why did you not test magny core ?JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
For the same reason that there are no Magny-Cours benchmarks on AMD's site yet :-).drewintheav - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
The INTEL i7 980X has dual QPI's and will run in a dual socket mainboard!!! Such as the EVGA W555 /Classified SR-2Lukas - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
No, i7 980X has only a single QPI link. But i'm pretty sure there's a corresponding W56xx CPU, with two QPI links and twice the price tag.thunng8 - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
"server CPU architecture which already has the fastest cores on the market and you’ll get very impressive results"This is not entirely correct. If you limit your self to x64 architecture, it is correct, but the recently released IBM POWER7 8 core chip blows away the Nehalem architecture in the benchmarks released so far.
For example, a 4 chip, 32 core 3.55Ghz POWER7 server does 85,220 SAPS in the SAP SD 2 tier benchmark and that isn't even the top bin POWER7. (top bin is 3.86Ghz with double the memory bandwidth / core) There are even larger margins in other benchmarks like specIntRate etc.
Photubias - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
Just curious: what software (OS/applications) run on that 8Core POWER7 chip?Lukas - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
Linux, AIX, IBM i, z/OSThat's pretty much it. Lot's of traditional OLTP workloads run on those platforms. Several flight booking systems run on z/OS.
Penti - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
z/OS runs on System Z systems with z10 CICS processors. Eg Mainframes.IBM System i servers are just high-end POWER servers. Running mainly Java and database loads, directly on IBM i/OS (previously i5/OS and before that AS/400) or AIX, or Linux. IBM DB2 is integrated directly into IBM i/OS.
Torment - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - link
And what does that setup cost?vitchilo - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
What would be great is ONE game test... like Crysis or something...And ONE X264 encode test...
Thanks a lot.