AMD's 3rd generation Opteron versus Intel's 45nm Xeon: a closer look

64-bit MySQL (Linux 64-bit)

MySQL has released version 5.1.22, which supposedly can scale up to eight CPU cores. That would be a huge improvement considering that all versions earlier than 5.0.37 could only make good use of two CPU cores. In our experience, this new binary scales well up to four cores, but eight cores are easily 20% slower than four core systems. Thus, we tested with a maximum of four cores.

Please note that these results cannot be compared with our earlier MySQL results. MySQL v5.1.22 is a completely different binary than v5.0.2x we tested previously. Although it still doesn't scale beyond four cores, it is up to 70% (!!) faster than v5.0.26 that came standard with our SLES 10 SP1. For smaller servers with four cores, MySQL is once again an ultra fast database.

Moreover, the third generation of Opterons absolutely loves this new MySQL version. At 2.5GHz, it is just as fast (the margin of error is up to 4%) as the mighty Xeon 5472 at 3GHz. As we failed to profile MySQL in depth (CodeAnalyst for Linux still has some quirks), we cannot pinpoint the exact reason why the Opteron 23xx is so good at this. The MySQL database is mostly limited by synchronizing the locks, so we suspect that the slightly faster cache coherency syncing on the Opteron 23xx might be one of the reasons AMD's latest performs so well.

WinRAR 3.62 (Windows 32-bit)

WinRAR 3.62 is a completely different kind of workload.

Notice that contrary to the other workloads we have profiled so far, WinRAR does not run perfectly in the L1 or L2 cache. Second, notice the huge amount of loads that happen: more than one per retired instruction.

The massive bandwidth that Barcelona can offer multi-threaded software pays off here. You can also see that the Seaburg chipset improves the score of the 3GHz quad-core Xeon by 7%.