Xeon 2.8GHz DP & 2.0GHz MP - Part I: Taking over the Enterprise

AnandTech Web DB Performance 6X Load 1494MB DB (Transactions per Second - Higher is Better) 4-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz (Hyper-Threading) 4-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz 2-way Intel Xeon DP 2.8GHz (Hyper-Threading) 2-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz (Hyper-Threading) 2-way Intel Xeon DP 2.8GHz 2-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz 2-way AMD Athlon MP 2200+ 1728.1 1398.3 1170.3 1066.2 932.8 781.5 764.0 | 0 | 346 | 691 | 1037 | 1382 | 1728 | 2074

Things change slightly as we increase the load to 6X; for starters, the 2-way Athlon MP and 2-way Xeon MP setups swap positions but still offer very similar performance.

The 4-way Xeon MP continues to exert its dominance, extending its lead over the 2-way Xeon DP to 48%. The performance gain by going to 4 CPUs in this case ends up being an incredible 62%. It is clear that server applications scale much better with more processors than anything we could ever find in the desktop or workstation arenas.

Hyper-Threading continues to offer impressive performance gains; once again, the higher the load the more the CPU has to go to I/O and the more periods of idle execution are present. The end result is that Hyper-Threading yields a 23% gain on the 4-way Xeon MP, a 25% gain on the Xeon DP and a 36% gain on the Xeon MP. It is very interesting to note that the largest boost from Hyper-Threading comes with the 2-way Xeon MP setup and not the 2-way Xeon DP configuration as we originally theorized. One possible explanation is that the load isn't great enough to completely saturate the 2-way Xeon DP platform whereas the slower 2-way Xeon MPs are more CPU bound in this test; the outcome being that the CPU bound 2-way Xeon MP configuration benefits more from being able to use all of its execution power.