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
To give you an idea of the scale of this benchmark we have graphs of stored procedures calls per second. We decided to focus on Stored Procedures / Second rather than Transactions / Second as the definition of a Transaction can have a business context or a technical context.
An interesting preview of the results to come: in 2-way configurations the Xeon is actually able to slightly outperform the Opteron. The added cache and 3.0GHz+ clock speed does seem to help the Xeon tremendously.
The Opteron goes from lagging slightly behind the Xeon to offering a 8.5% performance advantage in a 4-way configuration. The Xeon's shared FSB severely clips its wings when moving to a 4-way setup.
If you're familiar with these sort of database applications, the above graphs will give you a good idea of what sort of stress we're putting on these systems; we are pushing enterprise class performance limits. Now onto the results:
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skiboysteve - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
whats the deal with the slow ddr333 memoryJason Clark - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Cygni, if you have a peek at the 2 way web test we took shots of the monsters in that article..Cheers
SDA - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Ouch. At first it doesn't look like Intel is pwnd (sure, they lose in the four-way benchmarks, but as Opteron vs. Xeon benches go this one's still pretty close)... then the cost of the Xeon is factored in, especially relative to the Opteron 24x (which is even cheaper and equally suitable for 2-way systems).Things might change with the FSB800 Xeons, though. The Opteron will still offer a lot more bang for the buck, but the Xeon might offer more bang then. It all depends on how well the 90nm Opterons scale, I guess.
Cygni - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Very cool. So if your going 2 way for a DB, Xeon's look pretty good. I wouldnt have expected that.And can you guys snap some pics of the 4 way Xeon and Opteron boxes for us techno geeks that need a new wallpaper? ;)
Jason Clark - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Numa was turned on.... 64Bit is just waiting on software. Although 64bit is a reality hardware wise, software still has a loooong way to go yet. We may do some 64 Bit .NET stuff at some point in the future as well.SUOrangeman - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Looks like DDR400 ECC+Reg is readily available to me as well ...http://www.crucial.com/store/listmodule.asp?module...
-SUO
Boonesmi - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
christophergorge - ddr400 reg/ecc (ie pc3200) is very much available, i just put 2gb in a cad/cam opteron workstation a couple weeks agodweigert - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
I can't wait to see what happens when they do these again with NUMA turned on and a 64 bit OS. GamePC just released a set of astounding memory benchmarks,http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=opt...
This ought to be some food for thought.
menads - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
To the people that said there is no DDR400 w ECC -that is pure BS! ECC/Reg DDR400 IS available for more than an year and the latest official Opteron SPEC submission of AMD is done with such memory!ViRGE - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Just a quick question for whoever knows the answer: what's the die size on the 4MB Xeon?