High-End x86: The Nehalem EX Xeon 7500 and Dell R810

SAP S&D 2-Tier

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 decided to look at SAP's benchmark database. 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 obtains scores that are 25% lower. We analyzed the SAP Benchmark in-depth in one of our previous server oriented article. 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

Since we gather the benchmark data from the SAP site, we have to work with what we found so far. A quad Xeon X7560 outperforms an octal-core Opteron 8435 at 2.6GHz by small margin (3%). A quad Opteron 6176 at 2.3GHz should score about 48k-50k. That is competitive performance, but this market will probably prefer the Xeon platform, as price is less an issue and reliability features are on top of the checklist. The Power 7 servers outperform the Nehalem EX CPUs, but the top models (3.55GHz) cost around $100k.