Intel Woodcrest, AMD's Opteron and Sun's UltraSparc T1: Server CPU Shoot-out
by Johan De Gelas on June 7, 2006 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Database Performance Analysis
To make sense out of all these numbers, we summarized our findings below.
As the Xeon 5160 is not yet released, and it is unclear what AMD will do in response, we were curious how a 3 GHz Opteron would compare to our 3 GHz Woodcrest. Both architectures have similar pipeline lengths and will probably attain more or less the same clockspeeds under the same process technology, though of course Intel is ahead when it comes to process technology. It is interesting to see how the Opteron compares clock for clock with the new Xeon.
The Xeon's advantage in Open source databases is significant but not as spectacular as the Spec 2000 Integer numbers. The fact that Woodcrest scales better, or should we say "less bad", is most likely a result of the massive 4 MB L2 cache. As said before, increasing the cache of the previous Xeon generation from 1 to 2 MB results in about 7-8% higher performance. While we cannot be sure that those number are also applicable to Opteron or Woodcrest, it is pretty clear that the 4 MB cache does give the newest Xeon a performance boost.
Despite the fact that Woodcrest is a behemoth when it comes to integer performance, it does not outperform the Opteron by a large margin in MySQL on clock for clock basis. The problem seems to be the FB-DIMM latency. A quick test with higher latency RAM on the Opteron showed that increasing the latency of the RAM subsystem by 20% resulted in a 20 to 25% decrease of MySQL performance. Although this doesn't allow us to get a precise idea of how memory latency influences Woodcrest's MySQL performance, it shows us clearly that memory latency has a big impact on MySQL's performance in our tests.
Web Server Performance Analysis
Below is our summary of web server performance. While we averaged the database numbers, we took the peak numbers of our web server tests. The reason is that at lower request rates, all systems perform the same. "Jsp" gives you the Java Server Page performance, AMP stands for Apache/MySQL/PHP.
Extrapolating the performance of our 2.4 GHz Opteron 280 to 3 GHz again makes it for an interesting comparison.
When it comes to web server performance, the newest Xeon is unbeatable and crushes the competition. A 3 GHz Opteron is not going to help.
Power
As our Woodcrest test system did not have DBS enabled, we decided to test only under full load. Again, take the results with a grain salt, as it is impossible to make everything equal. We tested all machines with only one power supply powered on, and we also tried to have a similar amount and type of fans (excluding the CPU fan, where the T1 doesn't have one). There are still differences between the motherboards, and the Sun uses 2.5 inch disks.
Simply looking at the power numbers, the T2000 server beats the rest. We were informed that the current T2000 Servers now ship with high efficiency 450W Power supplies (our T2000 uses a 550 Watt one), which will further reduce power consumption 10 Watts or more. From a performance/Watt point of view, the new Woodcrest CPU is the winner in most workloads.
To make sense out of all these numbers, we summarized our findings below.
| Database Performance (Linux) | |||||
| MSI K2-102A2M Opteron 275 | MSI K2-102A2M Opteron 280 | Opteron 280 vs. Opteron 275 |
Extrapolated Opteron 3 GHz | Xeon 5160 3 GHz |
|
| MySQL - Dual-core | 749 | 805 | 7% | 946 | 996 |
| MySQL - Quad-core | 590 | 622 | 5% | 703 | 904 |
| PostgreSQL | 490 | 524 | 7% | 616 | 673 |
As the Xeon 5160 is not yet released, and it is unclear what AMD will do in response, we were curious how a 3 GHz Opteron would compare to our 3 GHz Woodcrest. Both architectures have similar pipeline lengths and will probably attain more or less the same clockspeeds under the same process technology, though of course Intel is ahead when it comes to process technology. It is interesting to see how the Opteron compares clock for clock with the new Xeon.
| Database Scaling (Extrapolated) | ||
| Xeon 5160 vs. Opteron 280 |
Xeon 5160 vs. Extrapolated Opteron 3 GHz |
|
| MySQL - Dual-core | 24% | 5% |
| MySQL - Quad-core | 45% | 29% |
| PostgreSQL | 28% | 9% |
The Xeon's advantage in Open source databases is significant but not as spectacular as the Spec 2000 Integer numbers. The fact that Woodcrest scales better, or should we say "less bad", is most likely a result of the massive 4 MB L2 cache. As said before, increasing the cache of the previous Xeon generation from 1 to 2 MB results in about 7-8% higher performance. While we cannot be sure that those number are also applicable to Opteron or Woodcrest, it is pretty clear that the 4 MB cache does give the newest Xeon a performance boost.
Despite the fact that Woodcrest is a behemoth when it comes to integer performance, it does not outperform the Opteron by a large margin in MySQL on clock for clock basis. The problem seems to be the FB-DIMM latency. A quick test with higher latency RAM on the Opteron showed that increasing the latency of the RAM subsystem by 20% resulted in a 20 to 25% decrease of MySQL performance. Although this doesn't allow us to get a precise idea of how memory latency influences Woodcrest's MySQL performance, it shows us clearly that memory latency has a big impact on MySQL's performance in our tests.
Web Server Performance Analysis
Below is our summary of web server performance. While we averaged the database numbers, we took the peak numbers of our web server tests. The reason is that at lower request rates, all systems perform the same. "Jsp" gives you the Java Server Page performance, AMP stands for Apache/MySQL/PHP.
| Webserver Performance | |||||
| MSI K2-102A2M Opteron 275 | MSI K2-102A2M Opteron 280 | Opteron 280 vs. Opteron 275 |
Extrapolated Opteron 3 GHz | Xeon 5160 3 GHz |
|
| Jsp - Peak | 144 | 154 | 7% | 182 | 230 |
| AMP - Peak | 984 | 1042 | 6% | 1178 | 1828 |
Extrapolating the performance of our 2.4 GHz Opteron 280 to 3 GHz again makes it for an interesting comparison.
| Webserver Scaling (Extrapolated) | ||
| Xeon 5160 vs. Opteron 280 |
Xeon 5160 vs. Extrapolated Opteron 3 GHz |
|
| Jsp - Peak | 49% | 26% |
| AMP - Peak | 75% | 55% |
When it comes to web server performance, the newest Xeon is unbeatable and crushes the competition. A 3 GHz Opteron is not going to help.
Power
As our Woodcrest test system did not have DBS enabled, we decided to test only under full load. Again, take the results with a grain salt, as it is impossible to make everything equal. We tested all machines with only one power supply powered on, and we also tried to have a similar amount and type of fans (excluding the CPU fan, where the T1 doesn't have one). There are still differences between the motherboards, and the Sun uses 2.5 inch disks.
| Max Power usage (100% CPU load - Watts) | ||
| Configuration | Power | |
| Sun T2000 | 1CPU / 8 Cores - 8 GB RAM | 188 |
| Dual Opteron 275 HE | 2CPU's (275HE) - 4 GB RAM | 192 |
| Dual Opteron 275 | 2CPU's - 4 GB RAM | 239 |
| Dual Xeon 5160 3 GHz | 2 CPU's - 4 GB RAM | 245 |
| Dual Xeon "Irwindale" 3.6 GHz | 2CPU's - 8 GB RAM | 374 |
Simply looking at the power numbers, the T2000 server beats the rest. We were informed that the current T2000 Servers now ship with high efficiency 450W Power supplies (our T2000 uses a 550 Watt one), which will further reduce power consumption 10 Watts or more. From a performance/Watt point of view, the new Woodcrest CPU is the winner in most workloads.
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rayl - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link
"Best Performance/Watt in the high end "Which part of performance per watt do you not understand? Do more, pay less.
MrKaz - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link
Dual Opteron 275 HE 2CPU's (275HE) - 4 GB RAM 192 Watts!!!Dual Opteron 275 2CPU's - 4 GB RAM 239 Watts!!!
Dual Xeon 5160 3 GHz 2 CPU's - 4 GB RAM 245 Watts!!!
http://www.intel.com/performance/server/xeon/ppw.h...">http://www.intel.com/performance/server/xeon/ppw.h...
Even Intel numbers show Xeon 3.6Ghz on par with AMD (obvious fake)
And the do more pay less, is not like you say on the server market, while your PC is doing lot of work (processing) with a computer game, most servers stand there doing almost nothing. Our servers for example from 0:00 to 8:00 do almost zero. Even in the day they work very little. Our Xeon 2.4 is more than enough, and I think most people think the same. Of course this depends a lot what you do, but this is generic. I think you know why virtualization is very important right?
rayl - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link
Isn't this obvious to you. Those are power consumption numbers at 100% CPU load. This is where performance/watt number really matters.If you're running idle, the power saving mode starts kicking in, you'll need a separate table to draw your conclusion.
Why this preoccupation with power consumption? 6-watts for a performance leap; it's moot.
coldpower27 - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link
It will be interesting to note the Delta difference between 1 Woodcrest 5160 and 2 is 59W as reported by TechReport, and since the TDP for Woodcrest 5160 is 80W TDP we can extrapolate and since the TDP for Woodcrest 5148 is 40W I can expect it to spew about 30W per processor.
245W - (2x29W) = 187W
This bring the Low Power Woodcrest system to ~ the same power usage as the HE Opteron 275's even with the heat spewing FB-DIMM's with higher performance per watt, pretty impressive.
Questar - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link
Yeah I'm worried about those six watts of power when I'm getting twice the performace.fikimiki - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link
You forgot about Intel chipset consumption - 22 Watts.So Intel has 245+22=267 vs. 192 and even if you are running in power-saving mode, chipset is running all the time...
coldpower27 - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link
No Wrong, they measured the system power consumption hence why the Woodcrests systems are so hungry in comparison to the Opteron the FB-DIMM's are what eating away at the wattage.So in the end it's 223 + 22 = 245, if indeed the chipset is consuming 22W.
Questar - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link
That was system power consumption - it included the chipset dufus.Saist - Wednesday, June 7, 2006 - link
I amd going to make the argument that evaluating only one version of Linux in this type of situation is not a good idea in and of itself. Not to knock Gentoo directly, it is a fine distro to itself, but it has a very small slice of the Linux market. It would have made more sense for Anandtech to have benchmarked using other distrobution types for a couple of reasons.The first reason is the ability to duplicate the tests. This is actually a strike against Gentoo for what the operating system is. While it possible to duplicate an installation of Gentoo and the applications used, generating an exact copy of the exact configuration used without clear description of the compile targets used is very hard. This means that anybody wishing to reproduce these results on their own will be very hard-pressed to do so.
The second reason is commercial and residential use. Gentoo has it's market, that market just isn't very widespread. It would have made more sense for Anandtech to have tested a RPM based distro such as Mandriva, RedHat, Fedora Core, Novell Suse, or OpenSuse against a .deb based distro such as Debian(sid), Ubuntu, Mepis, or Xandros. The reason why it would have made more sense is that .deb and .rpm distros are actually used in the commercial and residential spheres, and used in great quantities. Had Anandtech used a distrobution that is in active use it would mean more to buyers currently looking to replace their Windows computers with a new system.
It would only be in the interests in providing a point of perspective that one would test a different type of Linux distrobution like Gentoo or Slackware.
Going back to the first point, had Anandtech benchmarked these on a Debian based system it would be fairly easy to duplicate the tests. Anandtech would just need to list the base version of the Debian distro they used, list the apt-repositories they pulled from, and the application in apt that were pulled. Anybody else who comes along afterwords with a Debian based distro would easily be able to duplicate the steps and the benchmarks.
The overall point is that while it is nice to see a non-dedicated Linux site approaching hardware, this isn't the way to approach it. As it stands now, the Anandtech tests are useless, reguardless of whatever results the benchmarks returned.
BasMSI - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link
These tests are also 100% useless.....The MSI K2-102 is numa aware....
But for some reason the K8N-Master isn't shown in the graphs....that board is NOT NUMA aware.
I'm also missing the HP server everywhere in the graphs.
I realy believe all these tests are done on the K8N-Master board for all Opteron tests.
No way the graphs are showing all the systems.
These tests are a total fraude, letting us believe Intel all of a sudden became that fast.
No way on earth I believe any of these results.
Also, why using Gentoo? Why not Debian 64bit?
This puzzles me, as Gentoo is compiled but not known to be faster on every system.
Why not using precompiled Linuxes? Like Debian 64bit....that one is stable as hell and incredible fast!
Too much parameters missing here to get any judgement at all.
Do it better, this is 100% rubbish.
Bas.