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

AnandTech Ad DB Performance 6X Load 12.6GB 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 MP 2.0GHz (Hyper-Threading) 2-way Intel Xeon DP 2.8GHz (Hyper-Threading) 2-way Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz 2-way Intel Xeon DP 2.8GHz 2-way AMD Athlon MP 2200+ 2354.6 1992.1 1429.3 1390.7 1247.0 1246.1 995.4 | 0 | 471 | 942 | 1413 | 1884 | 2355 | 2826

We saw this in the last test, but the trend continues here as well - the 40% clock speed advantage of the Xeon DP 2.8 cannot make up for the presence of a 2MB on-die L3 cache on the Xeon MP and thus the two perform virtually identically to one another. This positions our Ad DB test as a very cache-friendly performance scenario, which also helps explain some of the interesting Hyper-Threading results we've seen.

Remember that when you're executing multiple threads on a single Xeon core, the threads effectively get half of the cache that they would have received had they been executing exclusively on the CPU. Assuming there is a great deal of locality between concurrent threads, then this reduction in useable cache isn't too big of an issue but it is clearly important here; the Xeon MP shows HT scaling equal to or greater than that of the higher clocked Xeon DP.

AMD unfortunately can't stand a chance in this test, falling almost 30% behind the slowest contender here with HT enabled.