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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Rand - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
perlgreen - Tuesday, June 1, 2004 - link
Is there any chance that you guys could do more tests and benchmarking on Linux for IT Computing/Servers? I really like your site, but it'd be really nice if there would be more stuff for fans of the Penguin!cheers,
Campbell
ragusauce - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
#54We have been building from source and trying different options / debug versions...
DBBoy - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
#47 - In OLAP, or poorly indexed environments where the amount of data exceeds the 4 MB L3 cache of the Xeons the Opteron is going to shine even more with it's increased memory bandwidth.Assuming you do not bottleneck on the disk IO the SQL cache/RAM will be utilised much more thus putting more of a burden on the FSB of the Xeons in addition to allowing the Opteron's memory bandwidth to display it's abilities.
Jason Clark - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
ragusauce, using binaries or building from source?Cheers
ragusauce - Friday, March 5, 2004 - link
We have been doing extensive testing of MySQL64 on Opteron and have had problems with seg faults as well.zarjad - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
Great, thanks.My thoughts:
In this type of application you are likely to use more than 4GB memory.
Memory bandwidth should matter because you will be doing a lot of full table scans (as opposed to using indexes).
Jason Clark - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
zarjad, I'll get back to you on that question I have some thoughts and amd discussing them with one of the guys that worked with us on the tests (Ross).zarjad - Thursday, March 4, 2004 - link
Jason, any comments on #47?Jason Clark - Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - link
The os used was windows 2003 enterprise which does indeed support NUMA. So NUMA was enabled.. this was covered in an earlier response.