Benchmark Configuration

First of all, a big thanks to Wannes De Smet, who assisted me the benchmarks. Below you can read the configuration details of our "real servers". The Atom machines are a mix of systems. The Atom 230 is part of a 1U server featuring a Pegatron IPX7A-ION motherboard with 4GB of DDR2-667. The N450 is found inside an ASUS EeePC netbook, and the Atom N2800 is part of Intel's DN2800MT Marshalltown mainboard. The latter has 4GB of DDR3-1333 while the former only has 1GB of DDR2-667.

Supermicro SYS-6027TR-D71FRF Xeon E5 server (2U Chassis)
CPU Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2660 (2.2GHz, 8c, 20MB L3, 95W)
Two Intel Xeon processor E5-2650L (1.8GHz, 8c, 20MB L3, 70W)
RAM 64/128GB (8/16x8GB) DDR3-1600 Samsung M393B1K70DH0-CK0
Motherboard X9DRT-HIBFF
Chipset Intel C600
BIOS version R 1.1a
PSU PWS-1K28P-SQ 1280W 80 Plus Platinum

The Xeon E5 CPUs have four memory channels per CPU and support DDR3-1600, and thus our dual CPU configuration gets eight DIMMs for maximum bandwidth. Each core supports Hyper-Threading, so we're looking at 16 cores with 32 threads.

Boston Viridis Server
CPU 24x ECX-1000 4c Cortex-A9 1.4GHz
RAM 24x Netlist 4GB (96GB) low-voltage ECC PC3L-10600W-9-10-ZZ DRAM
Motherboard 6x EC-cards
Chipset none
Firmware version ECX-1000-v2.1.5
PSU SuperMicro PWS-704P-1R 750Watt

Common Storage System

An iSCSI LIO Unified Target accesses a DataON DNS-1640 DAS. Inside the DAS we have set up eight Intel SSDSA2SH032G1GN (X25-E 32GB SLC) in RAID-0.

Software Configuration

The Xeon E5 server runs VMware ESXi 5.1. All vmdks use thick provisioning, independent, and persistent. The power policy is "Low Power". We chose the "Low Power" policy as this enables C-states while the impact on performance is minimal. All other systems use Ubuntu 12.10. The power management policy is "ondemand". This enables P-states on the Atom and Calxeda ECX-1000.

Software Support & The ARM Server CPU Measuring Bandwidth
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  • tuxRoller - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link

    Why WOULD you expect DVFS to boost performance?
    You seem to think it slightly revelational that the scores are slightly lower (but perhaps statistically meaningless).
  • dig23 - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link

    On-demand seems fair choice to me, its what best you can do on this OSes. But I will be very interested to see energy efficiency numbers when DVFS working on swarm of ARM nodes...:)
  • tuxRoller - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link

    It's not cpu governor I'm talking about but DVFS in particular.
    There's bound to be some small amount of latency involved with the process.
    It's point isn't for best performance but energy efficiency thus why I made the comment in the first place.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link

    There's the potential for DVFS to optimize for better performance on a few cores while putting some of the other cores into a lower P-state, but I think that would be more for stuff like Turbo Boost/Turbo Core. It's also possible Johan is referring to the potential for the optimizations to simply improve performance in general.
  • CodyHall - Friday, March 15, 2013 - link

    Love my job, since I've been bringing in $5600… I sit at home, music playing while I work in front of my new iMac that I got now that I'm making it online.(Click Home information)
    http://goo.gl/9u8us
  • JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    Can you tell me where I got you confused? Because I write "This allowed us to make use of Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS, P-states) using the CPUfreq tool. First let's see if all these power saving tweaks have reduced the total throughput."

    So it should been clear that we are looking for a better performance/watt ratio. The interesting thing to note is that ARM benefits from p-states, and that Intel's excellent implementation of C-states makes p-states almost useless.
  • Twonky - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link

    For information about a year ago the following post on the Linkedin ARM Based Group gave a link to a M.Sc. thesis publishing figures on the performance/watt ratio for Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 based boards:
    www.linkedin.com/groups/Single-CortexA8-CortexA9-in-comparison-85447.S.84348310
  • AncientWisdom - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link

    Very interesting read, thanks!
  • staiaoman - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link

    Damn, Johan. As always- an incredible writeup. Interesting thought experiment to figure that an upper bound on damage to INTC server share might be found by simply looking at how much of the market is running applications like your web server here (where single-threaded performance isn't as important).

    Intel powering phones and ARM chips in servers...the end is nigh.
  • JohanAnandtech - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link

    Thanks Staiaoman :-). I'll leave the though experiment to you :-)

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