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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Fraggster - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
intel=pwnd again :)Jason Clark - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
64Bit tests are next on our agenda, once there is an Extended 64bit version of SQL Server.... :) We're looking into other avenues as well.Andreas, windows 2003 enterprise is what we used.
fukka - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Would the Opterons gain any advantage using a 64bit OS (aka Linux) and a database that is much bigger than 4GB in size?That would be interesting to see, but I suppose the IA32e will address that advantage...
andreasl - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Hey Anand have you thought about moving to Server 2003 instead of running 2000? And any chance of seeing 64-bit results anytime soon? (does a 64-bit version of your app even exist?)christophergorge - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Opteron only works with ECC registered memory. They only come up to DDR333.raptor666 - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Maybe because 4 way boards might not support it.Just a guess but honestly i'm not sure.
Peter
tolgae - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
Stupid question probably but why didn't you use DDR400 on the Opteron?CRAMITPAL - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
No surprises here... Anyone with a clue has known for a year that Opteron/A64 is a far superior architecture to anything Intel bulds, sells, or plans to produce in the next two years.