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

AnandTech Web DB Performance

The first DB test we have is of the AnandTech Web DB; this is the database that houses all of the articles (including this one) and makes sure that they are available for you to read every day. As you can guess, the vast majority of requests to this database are selects (basically reads). The data request comes over the Internet, down through the NIC, to the CPU which then sends it to memory or I/O to fulfill the read request; this test simulates everything after the request hits the NIC.

The original copy of the database is 249MB but note that in the multiplied load test the overall working database size is multiplied as well (4x = 996, 12x= 2988MB etc...).

The purple bars indicate that Hyper-Threading was enabled, blue bars indicate Hyper-Threading disabled and the green bar is for AMD.

AnandTech Web DB Performance 1X Load 249MB 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 DP 2.8GHz 2-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz (Hyper-Threading) 2-way AMD Athlon MP 2200+ 2-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz 937.8 890.9 852.6 753.3 725.5 714.3 667.7 | 0 | 188 | 375 | 563 | 750 | 938 | 1125

First of all, the standings here won't be changing much but that is to be expected, especially as we increase the load. It would take a pair of very powerful CPUs to beat out a 4-way configuration like we have here.

Even at such low loads you can see that the 4-way Xeon MP offers a 30% performance boost over a 2-way Xeon MP system. But once you look at the 2-way 2.8GHz Xeon DP setup, the performance advantage of the 4-way Xeon MP system is much less impressive. Here the 4-way setup is only able to provide a 10% performance advantage over the 2-way 2.8GHz setup. The on-die L3 cache is the major reason behind this advantage since the load isn't great enough to stress all four CPUs.

Moving down to the 2-way configurations you can see that the 2-way Xeon MP, despite its large on-die L3 cache, cannot outperform the 2-way Xeon DP because of the DP's 40% clock speed advantage. Will this trend continue as we increase the load? There's only one way to find out, but we'll get to that in a bit.

The impact of Hyper-Threading has clearly improved since we first looked at the technology; on the 4-way Xeon MP setup there is a 5% performance advantage provided by HT, the 2-way Xeon DP gets a 13% boost and the 2-way Xeon MP receives a 9% kick in the pants. In theory, the performance boost provided by Hyper-Threading should increase as load increases simply because the increase in I/O utilization would trigger more periods of idle execution within the CPUs.

Once we factor AMD into the equation, it's clear that the clock speed and cache advantages of the Xeons are growing the performance gap. We are due for an Athlon MP 2400+ relatively soon which should help keep AMD competitive.